Computational Study for High- Efficiency eVTOL Proprotor Design

Electric Vertical Take-off and Landing (eVTOL) configuration has become increasingly common for modern Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) thanks to its combined benefits of vertically take-off and landing capabilities of multirotor aircraft with better range and efficiency of fixed-wing aircraft. In this study, a computational design approach for eVTOL rotor is proposed with a goal of improving vertical climb performance. Computational tools of different fidelities including a combined blade element-momentum (BEM) and an opensource reformulated vortex particle method (rVPM) solvers were used for computing rotor performance. A new rotor design has been found to reduce the power consumption by 6% during climb.