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Seoul National University VABS to design UAM, rotorcraft blades

University conducts research to establish conceptual and detailed design methodologies applicable to composite UAM systems and to develop digital twin technologies that can be used in aerospace.

Grace Nehls
Edited by:  Grace Nehls
Senior Managing Editor, ÂÌñÏ×ÆÞ and Products Finishing

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Blade section design and fan plot examples for analyzing the vibration characteristics of UAM (blade + graph) and overall UAM design and iterative flow chart. Sources | AnalySwift, SNU

(SNU, South Korea) has been participating in AnalySwift (West Lafayette, Ind., U.S.) Academic Partner Program (APP), using its VABS simulation software to analyze urban air mobility (UAM) and other rotorcraft rotor blades.

The work is part of the Active Aeroelasticity and Rotorcraft Laboratory (AARL) in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at SNU and the SNU-UAM Center, a research center dedicated to developing the core technologies for UAM. The APP offers participating universities no-cost licenses of engineering software programs VABS and SwiftComp so students, researchers and faculty can leverage the tools in their academic research.

The VABS program is a general-purpose cross-sectional analysis tool for predicting structural beam properties and recovering 3D stresses, strains and strengths of slender composite
structures. The tool models composite rotorcraft (helicopter, air mobility,
unmanned aerial vehicles) and wind turbine rotor blades, as well as other slender composite structures.

VABS delivers high-fidelity results early on to help computationally resolve engineering challenges, reduce trial and errors and arrive at the best solution quickly.

“The SNU-UAM Center brings together 12 laboratories from seven universities, including SNU, with the goal of securing core technologies for UAM,” says professor SangJoon Shin of the Department of Aerospace Engineering at SNU. “To ensure the safe operation of UAM, it will be essential to avoid ground resonance. VABS enables us to design the rotor blade cross-section that avoids resonance within the operational frequency range. We have been using the VABS program to perform cross-sectional design based on the given geometries and to achieve the desired vibration characteristics for the rotor blades integrated with a gimballed hub.”

First, the SNU team designed the blade cross-section and used VABS to obtain the corresponding stiffness matrix. Then, this result was provided into Camrad II, a performance analysis program for rotorcraft, to compute the vibratory response under realistic flight conditions.

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