ONERA

The EFAICTS project proposes to develop and integrate in Active Side-Stick Units (ASSU), optimised coupling and haptic functions for both Pilot/Co-pilot and Crew/Autopilot interactions. The concepts will be validated through modelling and evaluation on a simulation bench with experienced pilots. For dual pilot configuration, ASSU technology can provide intuitive tactile cueing in the cockpit — all resulting in increased situational awareness, safety and improved ergonomic, performance and opens a new mode of communication between the pilot and the co-pilot. In addition, with passive inceptors, the principal information transfer from the aircraft to the pilot still remains visual cueing or alarms. Through ASSU, haptic cueing is an efficient and intuitive communication mode with the crew. EFAICTS project proposes a Human-Centred Design approach, in which the end-users are at the heart of the development, from the beginning to the final evaluation phase. This approach will be applied in the four technical work packages about the flight scenarios definition and evaluation; the PF/PNF/AP interactions and transition phases definition; the specification and development of haptic feedbacks and ergonomic requirements; the evaluation of haptic feedback and ergonomic recommendations. The project will focus on a Tiltrotor aircraft and its specificities since operating as both rotary and fixed wing aircraft and as hybrids in the unique conversion corridor. The activities and proposed solutions will lead to situational awareness improvement, crew coordination, workload reduction, better performances and weight reduction. All these benefits will result in more competitive aeronautic Industry in Europe a safer and greener aeronautics transport. The proposed project is lead and conducted by the ONERA and will run over a period of 42 months, with a grant request is of 594,985€. EFAICTS will deliver a TRL6 level ASSU configurations optimised with intuitive coupling and haptic functio

Aeroelastic instabilities are at the origin of large deformations of structures and are limiting the capacities of products in various industrial branches such as aeronautics, marine industry, or wind electricity production. If suppressing aeroelastic instabilities is an ultimate goal, a paradigm shift in the technological development is to take advantage of these instabilities to achieve others objectives, as reducing the drag of these flexible structures. The ground-breaking challenges addressed in this project are to design fundamentally new theoretical methodologies for (i) describing mathematically aeroelastic instabilities, (ii) suppressing them and (iii) using them to reduce mean drag of structures at a low energetic cost. To that aim, two types of aeroelastic phenomena will be specifically studied: the flutter, which arises as a result of an unstable coupling instability between two stable dynamics, that of the structures and that the flow, and vortex-induced vibrations which appear when the fluid dynamics is unstable. An aeroelastic global stability analysis will be first developed and applied to problems of increasing complexity, starting from two-dimensional free-vibrating rigid structures and progressing towards three-dimensional free-deforming elastic structures. The control of these aeroelastic instabilities will be then addressed with two different objectives: their suppression or their use for flow control. A theoretical passive control methodology will be established for suppressing linear aeroelastic instabilities, and extended to high Reynolds number flows and experimental configurations. New perturbation methods for solving strongly nonlinear problems and adjoint-based control algorithm will allow to use these aeroelastic instabilities for drag reduction. This project will allow innovative control solutions to emerge, not only in flutter or vortex-induced vibrations problems, but also in a much broader class of fluid-structure problems.

The main objective of the CONCERTO project is to provide the topic leader (Airbus Helicopters) of the Clean Sky 2 IADP Fast Rotorcraft with a new computational tool enabling the noise modelling and prediction of lateral rotors installed on the future LifeRCraft demonstrator. This tool, enabling both fast prediction and high fidelity approaches, will include 3 modules: aerodynamics, free field acoustic and scattering effects. All three will be, implemented in a chaining process, based on a seamless workflow and software environment that will be created during the project. While aerodynamics module relies on PUMA code (Free Wake) as Fast aerodynamic solver and TAU code (CFD) as High fidelity solver, free field acoustic solver will use the KIM code (FW-H). KIM code will also be implemented for fast scattered acoustic prediction, while BEMUSE code (BEM) will be implemented for high fidelity scattered prediction. The overall tool will be validated and applied to a subset of the LifeRCraft flight domain. The project will be implemented through 6 WPs: WP1 Workflow definition and implementation; WP2 Aerodynamics module; WP3 Free-field acoustic module; WP4 Scattered field acoustic module; WP5 Validation; WP6 Project Management, dissemination and exploitation. CONCERTO consortium, ONERA and DLR, will deliver and install the necessary tools at the topic leader location including documentation, support and possible updates during the 3 years of the project. With a total budget of about € 635,000, the project will go beyond the state of the art (investigating unsteady flight cases, capturing quadripole noise sources, solving efficiently the multi-frequency problem of combined main rotor and lateral rotors, etc.), and will fully address user needs, contribute to the maturation and future commercialization of a new aircraft vehicle satisfying new mobility roles, thus contributing to the competitiveness of the European aeronautics sector.