The U.S. Army partnered with Brown University and Iowa State University to develop a method that allows aircraft to adjust rotors automatically in-flight for augmented turbine performance.
Army Research Laboratory (ARL), part of the service's Combat Capabilities Development Command, worked with academia to create a new concept in the area of variable speed, the Army said Tuesday.
“The variable speed concept improves performance by maintaining blade aerodynamic efficiency within the optimum range at all operating conditions,” said Luis Bravo, aerospace engineering researcher at the Army.
A research paper titled “Optimizing gas turbine performance using the surrogate management framework and high-fidelity flow modeling” contains the team's published findings on the topic.
The team will further mature the study through the development and testing of a prototype that embodies the concept.
