THESIS
2020
xii, 105 pages : illustrations (some color) ; 30 cm
Abstract
Amphibious aircraft have the potential to meet the demands of increasing air transportation
by taking off and landing on seas as well as runways. They face engineering design challenges
of performing takeoffs and landings on both water and land, with water-takeoffs being relatively
more complex for analyses. The reduction of the water-takeoff distance via the use of hydrofoils
was a subject of interest in the 1970s, but the computational power to assess their designs was
limited. In this thesis, a preliminary computational design framework for hydrofoils is proposed
and implemented for the purpose of investigating improvements in the water-takeoff performance of
amphibious aircraft. The design framework includes configuration selections and sizing methods for
hydrofoils to fit w...[
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Amphibious aircraft have the potential to meet the demands of increasing air transportation
by taking off and landing on seas as well as runways. They face engineering design challenges
of performing takeoffs and landings on both water and land, with water-takeoffs being relatively
more complex for analyses. The reduction of the water-takeoff distance via the use of hydrofoils
was a subject of interest in the 1970s, but the computational power to assess their designs was
limited. In this thesis, a preliminary computational design framework for hydrofoils is proposed
and implemented for the purpose of investigating improvements in the water-takeoff performance of
amphibious aircraft. The design framework includes configuration selections and sizing methods for
hydrofoils to fit within aircraft constraints derived from a flying-boat amphibious aircraft conceptual
design for general aviation. The position, span, and incidence angle of the hydrofoil are optimized
for minimum water-takeoff distance in consideration of the longitudinal stability of the aircraft in the
speed regime of elevator ineffectiveness. The analyses and optimizations are performed by means
of water-takeoff simulations, which incorporate hydrodynamic forces such as lift and drag with
cavitation effects from the hydrofoil, obtained via 2D computational fluid dynamics simulations to
generate surrogate models for reductions in computational time. The design procedure is evaluated
in a case study of a 10-seater amphibious aircraft; the results indicate that the addition of a
supercavitating hydrofoil design achieves the purpose of reducing water-takeoff distance, which
demonstrates its potential to improve the takeoff performance. A detailed design framework for
amphibious aircraft considering the relevant constraints is also proposed.
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