Urban air taxis, also known as urban air mobility (UAM) vehicles, are anticipated to be an area of significant market growth in the near future. These vehicles are typically vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) designs which are capable of carrying 1 to 30 passengers in an intra-urban environment with flights of less than 50 nautical miles. Development of UAM vehicles and their integration into the airspace will be enabled by advancements in a number of areas including electrified propulsion systems, structures, acoustics, automation, and controls. However, the strong multidisciplinary interactions for these unique vehicles presents a significant new design challenge. This work describes the development of a multidisciplinary analysis and optimization environment which can be used to support the conceptual design of these UAM vehicles, using efficient gradient based optimization with analytic derivatives. The tools included in this multidisciplinary analysis model the aircraft trajectory, vehicle aerodynamics, structures, and electrified propulsion system. The multidisciplinary environment created in this research is unique in that all the physics tools are tightly integrated together, with the trajectory model directly calling the aerodynamics, structures, and propulsion models. This multidisciplinary analysis environment is then demonstrated in the design optimization of a turboelectric tiltwing UAM vehicle concept.
In recent years, our understanding of the electrical performance of various PV technologies under artificial or natural low light conditions has grown significantly. The main motivating factor for such measurements has been the desire to add to the growing knowledge on how to efficiently harvest ambient light energy in office spaces and homes for powering a variety of electronic devices, particularly Internet-of-Things smart sensors. [1][2][3][4][5] PV cells composed of various cell technologies (a-Si, c-Si, III-V semiconductors, dye-sensitized, and perovskite) have been compared under low light conditions for indoor energy harvesting purposes. [6][7][8] Various types of artificial lighting have been investigated to determine the highest energy density cells for each source. 9,10 Specific spectra in low
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.