Funded by BYU's High-Impact Doctoral Research Fellowship, my PhD research aimed at characterizing the complex aerodynamic and aeroacoustic interactions encountered in distributed propulsion of electric VTOL aircraft, or "flying cars".
The main outcome was a variable-fidelity simulation framework for aerodynamic and aeroacoustic analysis of rotor-rotor and rotor-wing interactions in aircraft design. This framework was coded from scratch, developing novel models to accurately predict the complex interactions of multirotor aircraft.
As part of my PhD, I supervised and guided the experimental work of fellow grad students on multirotor interactions. This included load-balance wind tunnel measurements of the rotor performance, PIV of the wakes mixing between rotors, and acoustic measurements in an anechoic chamber.
Through this experimental work, we attained a fundamental understanding of the aerodynamic and aeroacoustic interactions, while gathering data for validation of our computational tools.
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
• E. J. Alvarez (2022). "Reformulated Vortex Particle Method and Meshless Large Eddy Simulation of Multirotor Aircraft". Doctoral Dissertation, Brigham Young University. [PDF]
• E. J. Alvarez & A. Ning (2022). "FLOWUnsteady: An Interactional Aerodynamics Solver for Multirotor Aircraft and Wind Energy." AIAA AVIATION Forum. [VIDEO][PDF]
• E. J. Alvarez, A. Schenk, T. Critchfield, and A. Ning (2020). "Rotor-on-Rotor Aeroacoustic Interactions of Multirotor in Hover." Vertical Flight Society 76th Forum. [SLIDES][PDF]