STUDY OF EFFECTS ON THE WING’S AERODYNAMIC CHARACTERISTICS DUE TO DISTRIBUTED PROPULSION OVER WINGSPAN

Resumo

© (2022) by International Council of Aeronautical Sciences (ICAS) All rights reserved.Distributed propulsion (DP) is not a new concept but recent advances in electric motors and batteries, along with the need for more environmentally friendly products, brought this concept back to the spotlight. This paper addresses two types of DP: wingtip-mounted propellers and distributed propellers along the wingspan. The benchmark of the analysis is NASA’s X-57 "Maxwell" demonstrator. Another goal of this paper is to evaluate how good is the VSPAERO code to modeling aerodynamic flows, from a simple case of the isolated wing to a more complex 14 rotors case. The overall results show that VSPAERO provides good estimations for most cases.

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