Critical Aerodynamics and Flight Dynamics Challenges of Mars Rotorcraft

Operating rotorcraft in the thin Martian atmosphere presents unique aerodynamic and flight dynamics challenges—first addressed during NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter mission in 2021. This seminar reviews these challenges for both current and future Mars rotorcraft. Topics include the characteristics of the Martian aerodynamic regime, Earth-based testing approaches, and Ingenuity’s flight dynamics validation on Mars.
Future rotorcraft concepts will be significantly larger and more complex than Ingenuity’s coaxial design. Multi-rotor configurations introduce additional modeling difficulties, particularly in accurately capturing rotor wake interactions without resorting to computationally expensive blade-resolved CFD. To address this, the seminar will also discuss the application of the Viscous Vortex Particle Method (VVPM) as a mid-fidelity tool for simulating rotor wakes in Mars rotorcraft.
Speaker(s): Tove Agren, Tove
Virtual: https://events.vtools.ieee.org/m/536989