This paper presents a survey of published works on ducted fans for aeronautical applications. Early and recent experiments on full- or model-scale ducted fans are reviewed. Theoretical studies, lower-order simulations and high-fidelity CFD simulations are also summarised. Test matrices of several experimental and numerical studies are compiled and discussed. The paper closes with a summary of challenges for future ducted fan research.

Pilots are sometimes not provided with sufficient information to avoid go-arounds or other operational disruptions that result from low-level wind disturbances. We identified issues with existing windshear alerting systems and developed three types of airport low-level wind information systems to enhance pilot situational awareness of wind conditions by providing landing aircraft with quantitative and visualised wind information for ultimately mitigating air service disruptions due to low-level wind disturbances. The three systems, Airport Low-level Wind Information (ALWIN) and Low-level Turbulence Advisory System (LOTAS), both of which use Doppler radar/lidar, and Sodar-based Low-level Wind Information (SOLWIN), which uses Doppler SOnic Detection And Ranging (SODAR), have different costs and capabilities that allow the most cost-effective system to be selected for an airport according to its scale and local weather characteristics. This paper presents the operational concepts of our newly developed airport low-level wind information systems and describes their validation.

Extensive research in recent years has focused on improving the current loss-of-control prevention systems and developing new strategies for safe path planning of the impaired aircraft. Success in developing such systems requires a comprehensive perception of the influence of damage on the aircraft’s dynamic behaviour and performance, and the effect of various failure degrees on the flight envelope confinement and the remaining safe maneuvers. This paper comprehensively describes the effects of lateral control surface failure on the NASA Generic Transport Model (GTM) flight envelope, defined by a set of attainable steady-state maneuvers herein referred to as trim points. The study utilises a large database of high-fidelity maneuvering flight envelopes computed for the unimpaired case and wide ranges of the aileron and rudder failure cases at different flight conditions. Flight envelope boundary is rigorously investigated, and the key parameters confining the trim points at different boundary sections are identified. Trend analyses of the impaired flight envelopes and the corresponding limiting factors demonstrate the effect of various failure degrees on the remaining feasible trim points. Results can be employed in emergency path planning with potential uses in the development of aircraft resilient control and upset recovery systems.

The analysis of the aerodynamic environment of the re-entry vehicle attaches great importance to the design of the novel drag reduction strategies, and the combinational spike and jet concept has shown promising application for the drag reduction in supersonic flows. In this paper, the drag force reduction mechanism induced by the combinational spike and lateral jet concept with the freestream Mach number being 5.9332 has been investigated numerically by means of the two-dimensional axisymmetric Navier-Stokes equations coupled with the shear stress transport (SST) k-ω turbulence model, and the effects of the lateral jet location and its number on the drag reduction of the blunt body have been evaluated. The obtained results show that the drag force of the blunt body can be reduced more profoundly when employing the dual lateral jets, and its maximum percentage is 38.81%, with the locations of the first and second lateral jets arranged suitably. The interaction between the leading shock wave and the first lateral jet has a great impact on the drag force reduction. The drag force reduction is more evident when the interaction is stronger. Due to the inclusion of the lateral jet, the pressure intensity at the reattachment point of the blunt body decreases sharply, as well as the temperature near the walls of the spike and the blunt body, and this implies that the multi-lateral jet is beneficial for the drag reduction.

Prediction of aeroengine exhaust plume near-field development requires knowledge of velocity and turbulence distributions at nozzle exit. The high Reynolds number nozzle inlet boundary layers of engineering practice are fully turbulent, but acceleration can induce re-laminarisation. Thus, to reproduce nozzle exit conditions accurately, large eddy simulation (LES) for plume prediction must be capable of capturing re-laminarisation and any subsequent boundary layer recovery. Validation is essential to establish a credible LES methodology, but previous studies have suffered from lack of nozzle inlet/exit measurements in the test cases selected. Validation data were here taken from an experiment on a convergent round nozzle with a parallel exit extension to allow boundary layer recovery. LES inlet condition generation applied a rescaling/recycling method (R2M), whose performance was validated against measurements of first and second moment statistics as well as the turbulence integral length scale. Simulations employed two sub-grid-scale (SGS) models; these produced similar predictions up to the end of the nozzle convergent section, but marked differences appeared for the nozzle exit turbulence field. The Smagorinsky model predicted much lower turbulence levels than measured, whereas the Piomelli and Geurts model revealed the presence of a small separation region at the convergence/parallel section corner, which led to higher exit turbulence and much better agreement with measured data.

The increasing use of unmanned aerial vehicles in areas such as rescue, mapping, and transportation have made it necessary to study more accurate techniques for calculating flight time estimates. Such calculations require knowing the battery discharge profile. Simplified flight time calculation methods provide data with uncertainties as they are based solely on manufacturer datasheet information. This study presents a setup to measure the battery discharge curve using a LabVIEW interface with a low-cost acquisition system. The acquired data passes through a nonlinear optimisation algorithm to find the battery coefficients, which enables the more precise estimation of its range and endurance. The great advantage of this model is that it makes it possible to predict how the battery will discharge at different rates using just one experimental curve. The methodology was applied to three different batteries and the model was validated with different discharge rates in a controlled environment, which resulted in endurance lower than 3.0% for most conditions and voltage estimation error lower than 3.0% in operational voltage. The work also presented a methodology for estimating cruise time based on the current used during each flight stage.

In this paper, a robust three-dimensional guidance law against manoeuvering targets is designed using the approach of discrete-time partial stabilisation. In the proposed method, the equations of the guidance problem are divided into two subsystems where the asymptotic stability is desired only for the first one. The control input of the second subsystem is designed such that the collision to be ensured in a short time. Despite recent advances in technology and implementation of digital controllers, the design of guidance laws with the approach of discrete-time partial stabilisation has not been done, till now. One of the advantages of this paper is to design a discrete-time guidance law even with the difficulties of the discrete-time Lyapunov theorem. Moreover, the Lyapunov function is chosen based on the physics of the guidance problem (making the rate of line of sight (LOS) rotation close to zero), and it is shown that it is not possible to asymptotically stabilise the system in the case of manoeuvering targets. Nevertheless, to guarantee the collision with the target, it is enough to limit the rotation rate of LOS to a small value. Finally, simulation results are given to show the appropriate performance of the proposed guidance law.