Extreme Aerodynamics for Modern Air Vehicles
Air vehicles of all sizes are susceptible to extreme weather, but for small vehicles, wind gusts, air wakes, and other flow disturbances can also be problematic. Our research addresses the increasingly pressing challenge of robust flight in unsteady aerodynamic environments by advancing the field of extreme aerodynamics through the development of novel computational, experimental, and data-driven approaches. We develop specialized low-order modeling frameworks grounded in fluid dynamic theory and experimental data to enable fast, real-time state awareness of flow properties and vehicle performance. These approaches achieve dimensionality reduction and incorporate uncertainty quantification. Specialized computations and experiments produce data that are analyzed with state-of-the-art machine learning techniques for flow modeling, aircraft performance estimation, and airfoil design and vehicle shape optimization. This work is at the intersection of unsteady aerodynamics, applied mathematics, data assimilation, and machine learning towards the next generation of robust flight vehicles.
