IMPLICATION OF PATENT-PENDING STATUS

The following research is ongoing and/or targeted, much has a patent-pending status in the USA:

CFD in Vehicle Design and Biological Systems -Six refereed publication (see vitae) document current and ongoing CFD studies on both fundamentals and vehicle design. These studies will continue, including upgrading of at least six preprints toward refereed publications in the next six months. 

In a university environment, direct and indirect access to improved computational power will expedite this work. Also, a university environment provides colleagues and students to enrich and improve research and the experience. This program will be operational from day 1 at a university, and when appropriate, it will be expanded to apply similar fundamentals/techniques to biological systems which are natural follow-ups of my dissertation work.

The vehicle research is seven years into rapid evolution and rapidly gaining traction as a technological revolution. The technology is referred to as ground-effect flight transit (GEFT) which has advantages: a) over wheeled vehicles due to absence of rolling/drivetrain losses at cruising speeds and b) over aircraft by avoiding FAA regulations and absence of the need for gaining altitude, airports, and fuel reserves. Unlike hovercraft, GEFT are highly energy efficient; and unlike WIG aircraft, GEFT are lifting body designs able to operate at low aspect ratios consistent with highway/railways/roadways.

The technology consists of an upper-surface trailing-section propulsor which direct flow over the vehicles trailing taper. This combination overcomes boundary layer separation and achieves lower drag on vehicles where boundary layer separation occurs. When operated in ground-effect with the trailing edge close to the ground, higher pressures of a trailing-edge stagnation point facilitate the formation of higher pressures in a properly-engineering lower cavity of the vehicle. The generation of aerodynamic lift at cruising conditions mitigates rolling and drivetrain losses associated with wheel-based propulsion. Wheels, skis, or caterpillar tracks are used when cruising with minimal suspension support (e.g., 2% of the vehicle weight) as control and guidance technology to keep the cavity’s side fences in close proximity to water, ground, ice, highways, or railway tracks. Unlike other multimodal vehicles, such as most air taxi concepts, this multimodal technology is more efficient that the highway/railway/waterway modes without the GEFT embodiments.

Recent work has identified that boundary-layer separation mitigation embodiments can be applied to a range of vehicles operating with reduced or no ground effect. Also, recent work has identified that the entire taper and ground can act as a nozzle for a fan-based propulsion; through which, downward vectored velocities are transformed to horizontal velocities resulting in improved abilities to operate thicker/higher vehicles at GEFT efficiencies which exceed L/D values of 20. 

Rapid Prototype, Performance Testing, Commercialization – A factor limiting both funding and impact of GEFT technology is validation with physical prototypes and commercial prototypes. To advantage, CFD simulations of digital prototypes provide considerably more information than can be attained from physical prototypes in reasonable efforts. Hence, a R&D path matures in which CFD studies identify measurements that should be taken on field-test physical prototypes that will substantially verify the accuracy of the CFD prototypes and implicitly verify the abundant information available from CFD studies. Also, a digital prototypes and digital twins validated with physical prototypes can be used to significantly expedite progress in both research and understanding. The goal of this task is to develop a world-scale prototyping lab that, ideally, uses the same autocad/stl files used for CFD studies to 3D print the prototypes. A goal is to be able to produce those physical prototypes in less than a week toward the “world scale” lab target. On this topic, collaboration would be welcome since there are plenty of good opportunities in the CFD and molecular aerodynamics research topics discussed herein.

Vehicle & Multimodal Optimization –Vehicle optimization is an implicit topic of studies of digital prototypes and digital twins. A novel aspect of optimization that my published work and pioneered is the use of lost work as an objective function for highly-coupled systems. Here the aerodynamics of propulsor (e.g. ducted fans) thrust and L/D efficiency due to vehicle design are highly coupled, and use of lost work as a results-driven objective function is both effective and more definitive toward an end game of an optimal overall vehicle design. Recently published work is based on turbulence over the entire mesh as a measure of lost work—the objective function was easy to use based on Open Foam results. Also, the lost work objective function is easier to harness for ground-effect flight vehicles where: a) the ground blocks many of the energy losses in the downward and later directions and b) the ground facilitates formation of laminar flow behind the vehicle. There are flaws in the published lost work analysis. One flaw is that the lost work should be performed as a balance on the control volume boundaries versus the total control volume. The other is the simplification of only using lost work that manifests as turbulence. There are a number of approaches to gather more information from Open Foam results and adding of calculations (e.g., estimates of lost work under cavity fences) which can be incrementally added to the present optimization methods. Also, there are more-rigorous studies that can provide: a) increased accuracy, b) increased understanding, and c) implicit validation of work.  

Molecular Aerodynamics is one of these more-rigorous approaches. 

Also, current CFD results are based on use of STL files. This work will be expanded to use of digital prototypes based on parametric models such a surfaces defined by spline techniques. This approach combined with improved computational power will expedite the identification of first commercial applications. A problem with current vehicle simulations is that improved designs are identified faster than physical prototypes can be fabricated and tested. The goal here is to rapidly arrive at designs that have diminishing rates of return through CFD simulations. It should be noted that a local optimum on the design, for example, of a tow-assist trailer does not diminish the need for continued vehicle design work on applications like multimodal highway/railway/waterway which can provide breakthrough capabilities in marine transit.