Publication Date:
2019-12-10
Description:
Distributed Electric Propulsion technology is expected to yield up to a fivefold increase in
high-speed cruise efficiency for NASAs X-57 Maxwell flight demonstrator when compared
to a combustion-powered general aviation baseline. A portion of this increased efficiency is
due to beneficial aero-propulsive interaction inherent to the distributed propulsion
architecture. The measure of the relative increase in efficiency between a conventional and
distributed propulsion wing will be extracted from comparisons between flight test data from
the electrically powered X-57 Mod II configuration with a conventional wing, and from the
electrically powered X-57 Mod III/IV configuration with a distributed propulsion wing. Flight
test maneuvers that accommodate errors in instrumentation and the flight test environment
are developed to establish the power-off drag characteristics for all X-57 configurations.
Analysis of these maneuvers with typical errors, including pilot-in-the-loop simulation data
that incorporates simulated atmospheric turbulence effects, shows that the proposed power-off
flight maneuvers can generate accurate power-off drag predictions for the X-57. These
predictions show that the power-off differences in aerodynamic performance between the
conventional and distributed propulsion configurations can be accurately measured from
flight test data in the presence of typical data error sources.
Keywords:
Aircraft Design, Testing and Performance; Aircraft Propulsion and Power
Type:
NF1676L-31784
,
AIAA Aviation Forum and Expo; Jun 17, 2019 - Jun 21, 2019; Dallas, TX; United States
Format:
application/pdf
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