This work, supported for several years by the US Air Force Office of Scientific Research, is focused on developing reduced-order models for the aerodynamics encountered during flight events such as agile maneuvers or incident gusts. Next-generation aircraft are expected to exploit aerodynamics on a faster time scale than current aircraft. This means taking advantage of, for example, dynamic stall, flapping-wing flight, and aero-elastic interactions. Our group is developing descriptions of these aerodynamics that are designed to be suitable for use in flight control.

Our current project is entitled "Flow physics and distillation of the gust-induced stall of a low aspect ratio wing". With Professors Tim Colonius from Caltech and David R. Williams from Illinois Institute of Technology, we will develop estimators that use information from aerodynamic sensors to reconstruct the flow state and aerodynamic forces during stall maneuvers. This is a necessary component for exploiting the large transient lift encountered during the early stages of stall.

For an overview, see "Low Order Modeling for Agile Flight: Progress and Challenges", a recent talk given by Jeff in a special invited session on "Future of Fluids - Celebrating 60 Years of AFOSR" at the 2013 AIAA Fluid Dynamics Conference in San Diego.

Participants

• Dr Maziar Hemati (Ph.D., March 2013)
  Thesis: Vortex-Based Aero- and Hydrodynamic Estimation
• Dr Albert Medina (Ph.D., August 2013)
  Thesis: The Aerodynamics of Deforming Wings at Low Reynolds Number
• Dr Chengjie (Tony) Wang (Ph.D. 2014)
  Thesis: High-Fidelity Simulation and Low-Order Modeling of Bio-inspired Fluid Dynamics
• Dr Darwin Darakananda (Ph.D. 2017)
  Thesis: Vortex Models for Data Assimilation