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Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - NITROS (Network for Innovative Training on ROtorcraft Safety)

Teaser

Summary

Helicopters are used in applications providing a valuable contribution to society and economic growth. Today, the service of helicopters includes, search and rescue, coastguard, firefighting, disaster relief, territorial control, monitoring and inspection, heavy-lift support to construction and other sectors, aerial filming and media support. In the future, helicopters and other vertical flight vehicles are expected to see widespread use. However, several issues are to be addressed to increase the use of rotorcraft. In particular, aspects related to complexity of the operations and safety are of primary importance, due to the fact that in the last 20 years helicopter accident rates remained unacceptably high, when compared to fixed-wing aircraft. The complexity of the phenomena involved in rotorcraft flight calls for the training of engineers with a genuine multidisciplinary background.
The goal of NITROS is to train a new generation of aerospace engineers capable of developing innovative approaches in a unique cross-disciplinary research and training program encompassing Control Engineering, Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), Modelling and Simulation, Structural Dynamics and Human perception cognition and action. NITROS objectives include:
1) Develop a detailed framework for rotorcraft modelling integrating rigid-body and aeroservoelastic modelling features capable of dealing with structural or propulsion/mechanical system failures in rotorcraft.
2) Understand how humans can safely and efficiently be interfaced with rotorcraft technology.
3) Enhance the understanding of the complex aerodynamic environment in which the rotorcraft are working, often in hostile conditions of wake encounter threats, interactions with obstacles, icing and brownout.
NITROS is expected to inject a fresh new safety-centred approach in the rotorcraft engineering community, aligned with the European Union endeavour to reduce the rate of aviation accidents. All these goals can be reached by exposing the young researches to a dynamic network composed by some of the most renewed European engineering schools and research centres working in the rotorcraft field along with industrial partners including manufacturers, operators and certification entities.

Work performed

The recruitment of ESRs was finalised in November 2017, after a selection of more 110 candidates coming from allover the world. During the first the NITROS website was released with the logo, and double doctorate agreements were finalized. The Opening School, was held on 25th-26th January 2018. The morning section of 25th January was devoted to a preliminary meeting with ESRs. Then Project Working Groups were introduced and Matteo Ragazzi, Leonardo Helicopters, head of airworthiness, presented the EHOPS project, suggesting possible contributions from NITROS ESRs as Project Working Group activities. A General Meeting was held in the afternoon of 25th January and in the morning of 26th January. Each ESRs presented his/her research. In the afternoon of January, 26th, a meeting of the SSB was held, including the newly elected ESRs component. It was decided that to join the Safety workshop organized by NLR at ERF2018 and to hold the 1st training school in September 2018, attached to ERF. The first Training School on Human Machine Interface was organized in September 2018 at TUDelft and introduced the ESR to all possible problem that could arise in the interaction between pilots and a complex flying vehicle such as an helicopter.

Final results

\"In the second year of activity NITROS actually started to give its contribution to increase the safety awareness in the rotorcraft community. All ESRs started their researches. All ESRs conducted a first literature review in the subjects related to their specific researches and, where necessary, acquainted themselves with the required software. The state of each research is here reported briefly, with the exception of ESRs 5 and 8 who only recently joined the project.
ESR#1, Myles Morelli, used the state-of-the-art PoliMIce software for icing analysis and started to transform it for use on rotorcraft, to make it suitable for simulating complex and unsteady rotorcraft flow fields. This involved code validation with experimental data.
ESR#2 Sara Ghiasvand started working on modeling of thermal stress during cooling phases and mechanical response in fracture tests of the hybrid specimen, also with experimental tests. The main project on Health Monitoring started with the design of the experimental specimen.
ESR#3 , Nabi Hafiz Noor defined the scope of his research, dealing with flight dynamics modeling, real time piloted simulation and control allocation techniques for transformative VTOL aircraft. A model is developed for NASA XV-15 aircraft and validated against available flight data.
ESR#4, Neda Taymourtash worked on dynamic modeling and simulation, developing a multibody model of a 4-bladed rotor in MBDyn, validated in hover and forward flight. Moreover, planning and preparation of the experiment on interaction with obstacles has been started.
ESR#6, Simone Fasiello worked on the Phase-Aggression Criterion, aiming at better real-time detection of tendencies to RPCs. The PAC has been used with the nonlinear model of the Bo-105 available and built on Flightlab only for Rate Command systems.
ESR#7 Sergio Henriques Huecas participated in two series of experiments in December and in July, concerning encounters of helicopter and airwake of wind turbines. Writing and updating of Flightlab and Matlab scripts is underway for flight handling qualities analysis.
ESR#9 Ezgi Akel set up an initial 3-DOF model in order to generate basic handling quality parameters. A procedure has been defined, on the process of coming up with new criteria, for selection of starting point, manoeuvre or mission, baseline parameter to be enhanced, and effect of vibration.
ESR#10 Yu Ying developed a 3-DOF nonlinear longitudinal model of Bo-105 to get some physical feeling about Cat III PIO in helicopters and a stability and command augmentation system model has been built. Then, the influence of vehicle triggers was studied.
ESR#11 Daniel Friesen set up the first experiment with the aim of better understand the interactions between the pilot and different automated systems in the helicopter domain. The necessary software was set up and the experiment was conducted on TU Delftâ€™s SIMONA Research Simulator.
ESR#12 Paolo Scaramuzzino prepared an experiment devoted to transfer of training. This experiment was conducted during secondment to the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics and analysis of results was started.
The overall results are encouraging. NITROS is also contributing to the creation of a new standard for rotorcraft operation to improve safety of flight, like the EHOPS standard, interacting with major rotorcraft producers and planning a presentation of the work done during the annual EASA Rotorcraft Symposium.\"