An Efficient CFD Approach for Co-Axial Rotor Simulations

The advent of small-scale multicopter aircraft including quadand octocopter configurations has opened the door to cost-effective vertical flight technology. These aircraft are intended to be used in applications such as public transportation, recreational products, commercial tools, military technologies, and even extra-terrestrial planetary exploration. As the demand for these aircraft continues to rise, analysis capabilities for their design and performance prediction become increasingly useful. The complex problem involving rotor-rotor interactions calls for highfidelity prediction tools, but conventional approaches with these tools have immense computational demand. In this work, a computational fluid dynamics model is developed to analyze a co-axial configuration and is compared to conventional results. The methodology, benchmarking process, and preliminary results indicate that the modeling approach, which reduces the computational cost by more than two orders-of-magnitude over the conventional solution method, has potential for future analyses to support design.