• HOME
  • NEWS
  • EXPLORE
    • CAREER
      • Companies
      • Jobs
    • EVENTS
    • iGEM
      • News
      • Team
    • PHOTOS
    • VIDEO
    • WIKI
  • BLOG
  • COMMUNITY
    • FACEBOOK
    • INSTAGRAM
    • TWITTER
Sunday, August 3, 2025
BIOENGINEER.ORG
No Result
View All Result
  • Login
  • HOME
  • NEWS
  • EXPLORE
    • CAREER
      • Companies
      • Jobs
        • Lecturer
        • PhD Studentship
        • Postdoc
        • Research Assistant
    • EVENTS
    • iGEM
      • News
      • Team
    • PHOTOS
    • VIDEO
    • WIKI
  • BLOG
  • COMMUNITY
    • FACEBOOK
    • INSTAGRAM
    • TWITTER
  • HOME
  • NEWS
  • EXPLORE
    • CAREER
      • Companies
      • Jobs
        • Lecturer
        • PhD Studentship
        • Postdoc
        • Research Assistant
    • EVENTS
    • iGEM
      • News
      • Team
    • PHOTOS
    • VIDEO
    • WIKI
  • BLOG
  • COMMUNITY
    • FACEBOOK
    • INSTAGRAM
    • TWITTER
No Result
View All Result
Bioengineer.org
No Result
View All Result
Home NEWS Science News Chemistry

Army computer models unveil secret to quieter small drones

Bioengineer by Bioengineer
December 3, 2020
in Chemistry
Reading Time: 4 mins read
0
Share on FacebookShare on TwitterShare on LinkedinShare on RedditShare on Telegram

IMAGE

Credit: Sgt. Hillary Rustine

ABERDEEN PROVING GROUND, Md. — It’s no secret the U.S. Army wants its small unmanned aerial systems to operate quietly in densely-populated regions, but tests to achieve this can be expensive, time-consuming and labor-intensive according to researchers.

Miranda Costenoble, a graduate student researcher with the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command, now known as DEVCOM, Army Research Laboratory, presented work at the Vertical Flight Society’s 76th Annual Forum demonstrating how aviation experts can obtain information about airfoil boundary layers using computational fluid dynamics, or CFD, to enable the development of quieter air vehicles.

Smaller vehicles, like package delivery drones, for example, don’t typically fly as high as larger ones because they need to be able to land in virtually anyone’s front yard, she said. They also need to be quieter.

“Imagine a whole fleet of these delivery drones as loud; people aren’t going to want them in their neighborhoods,” Costenoble said. “So even though a small drone would produce less noise than a full-size rotorcraft in the first place just by virtue of being smaller and slower, there are more stringent requirements in terms of what’s expected from it.”

Researchers imagine any number of applications where the Army might like to deploy a small, stable, terrain-independent platform.

“Surveillance particularly gets talked about a lot as a sUAS application; however, if the adversary is aware that they’re being surveilled, they might shoot the sUAS down or hide from it,” she said.

If the sUAS sounds like 1,000 angry bees, then the adversary is going to notice it that much sooner and more easily, she said.

“So, this is a sound-sensitive application where the acoustic performance is going to be important to the overall design,” she said.

Costenoble, a doctoral candidate at University of Maryland College Park, works with other researchers on high-fidelity computational fluid dynamic codes, which small UAS designers can use to take acoustics into account just as easily as they would normally account for vehicle performance. This way, acoustics can be something, which is fundamental to sUAS design instead of being an afterthought, she said.

Costenoble is one of nine UMD students to earn Vertical Flight Foundation Scholarships this year.

It is not as simple as applying existing noise models for full-size rotorcraft to smaller ones, she said. Full-size rotorcraft, with large rotors moving at high speeds, operate in aerodynamic conditions where their acoustics are dominated by the sound of the rotor blades passing the observer; however, the smaller and slower rotors used on small UAS operate in a different aerodynamic regime, where acoustics are dominated by the noise created by the blades passing through and disturbing the air around them. Because this noise occurs across a range of medium and high frequencies, it is referred to as broadband noise.

“To take broadband noise into account during the small UAS design process, we use semi-empirical models,” she said. “Those models were developed over 30 years ago for a particular airfoil, and so may need to be updated to account for the physics of different airfoil shapes.”

Using these models requires some knowledge of the rotor blade airfoil’s boundary layer flow – that is, the airflow near the surface of the rotor blade’s airfoils – she said, since the disturbance of the air within the boundary layer is the source of the broadband noise.

“The parameters of the boundary layer flow are not available in prior literature for most airfoils, and cannot necessarily be obtained from simplified aerodynamics methods,” Costenoble said. “The goal of this work is to develop a method of obtaining the parameters of the airfoil boundary layer from an existing high-fidelity computational fluid dynamics code, without requiring any more effort from the code’s end-user than was required previously.”

The goal of her work is to develop a method of obtaining the parameters of the airfoil boundary layer from an existing high-fidelity computational fluid dynamics code, without requiring any more effort from the code’s end-user than was required previously, she said.

Without this methodology, researchers would obtain this kind of information from wind tunnel tests, “but those are expensive and time-consuming. It would also have been possible to use existing CFD codes, but would have required labor-intensive post-processing of the code’s output,” Costenoble said.

This project is part of a research program at the laboratory to address UAS platform design and control challenges. Researchers said they are looking for enabling capabilities to advance Army missions in the multi-domain operations.

“Interdependence of various research areas requires a comprehensive approach to develop solutions that improve a number of desired attributes in UAS’ such performance, maneuverability and noise simultaneously,” said Dr. Rajneesh Singh, lead for Vehicle Integrated Analysis at the laboratory.

Reducing noise emission without compromising on the UAS flight range or endurance has been “a hard problem for the S&T community,” Singh said, but this collaborative project gets the Army closer to addressing it.

Singh also credits ARL’s open campus business model, which allows the Army to expand the research network required for comprehensive approaches.

###

Researchers discuss this work in a paper, Computation and Extraction of Boundary Layer Parameters from Numerical Simulations for Use in Rotor Acoustics Models, representing collaborative work with the University of Maryland, College Park.

Visit the laboratory’s Media Center to discover more Army science and technology stories

DEVCOM Army Research Laboratory is an element of the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command. As the Army’s corporate research laboratory, ARL is operationalizing science to achieve transformational overmatch. Through collaboration across the command’s core technical competencies, DEVCOM leads in the discovery, development and delivery of the technology-based capabilities required to make Soldiers more successful at winning the nation’s wars and come home safely. DEVCOM is a major subordinate command of the Army Futures Command.

Media Contact
T’Jae Ellis
[email protected]

Original Source

https://www.army.mil/article/241373

Tags: MaterialsResearch/DevelopmentRobotry/Artificial IntelligenceSoftware EngineeringTechnology TransferTechnology/Engineering/Computer ScienceVehicles
Share12Tweet8Share2ShareShareShare2

Related Posts

blank

Flame Synthesis Creates Custom High-Entropy Metal Nanomaterials

August 2, 2025
Innovative Acid-Base Bifunctional Catalyst Enhances Production of Essential Lithium-Ion Battery Material

Innovative Acid-Base Bifunctional Catalyst Enhances Production of Essential Lithium-Ion Battery Material

August 1, 2025

Oven-Temperature Treatment (~300℃) Enhances Catalyst Performance by Six Times

August 1, 2025

5 Innovations Securing Water Sources and Ensuring Availability

August 1, 2025
Please login to join discussion

POPULAR NEWS

  • Blind to the Burn

    Overlooked Dangers: Debunking Common Myths About Skin Cancer Risk in the U.S.

    60 shares
    Share 24 Tweet 15
  • Neuropsychiatric Risks Linked to COVID-19 Revealed

    46 shares
    Share 18 Tweet 12
  • Dr. Miriam Merad Honored with French Knighthood for Groundbreaking Contributions to Science and Medicine

    46 shares
    Share 18 Tweet 12
  • Study Reveals Beta-HPV Directly Causes Skin Cancer in Immunocompromised Individuals

    38 shares
    Share 15 Tweet 10

About

We bring you the latest biotechnology news from best research centers and universities around the world. Check our website.

Follow us

Recent News

Evaluating and Mitigating Risks in Hydrogeothermal Heating

CDK Inhibitors Boost Neuroblastoma Differentiation, Retinoic Acid Sensitivity

Chimeric Exosomes Boost TNBC Immunotherapy via Lymph Nodes

  • Contact Us

Bioengineer.org © Copyright 2023 All Rights Reserved.

Welcome Back!

Login to your account below

Forgotten Password?

Retrieve your password

Please enter your username or email address to reset your password.

Log In
No Result
View All Result
  • Homepages
    • Home Page 1
    • Home Page 2
  • News
  • National
  • Business
  • Health
  • Lifestyle
  • Science

Bioengineer.org © Copyright 2023 All Rights Reserved.