Dr. Moble Benedict, assistant professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at Texas A&M University, has received a 2015 Defense University Research Instrumentation Program (DURIP) grant from the Army Research Office for his proposal titled “Instrumentation for Performance, Blade-Loads and Flowfield Measurement of Novel Hover-Capable Meso-Scale Aerial Platforms”. [TS1] [MJM2] Benedict directs the recently founded Advanced Vertical Flight Lab (AVFL), which focuses on the development of the next generation of vertical take-off and landing capable aircraft concepts.
This grant will provide $110,000 towards the development of a state-of-the-art micro air vehicle test facility at AVFL. This fully instrumented facility will be capable of measuring not only the fixed-frame hub loads, but also the blade airloads/surface pressure distribution in the rotating frame and the unsteady flowfield.
The test rig will be designed to have the resolution and bandwidth to accurately measure low-magnitude/high-frequency airloads and also resolve highly unsteady/vortex-dominated velocity field, which are typical of these small-scale hovering concepts such as cycloidal rotors and flapping wings. Once developed, the facility will be a significant step in the direction toward the development of next-generation meso-scale hover-capable aerial robotic platforms for Army and Department of Defense applications.