Sven Schmitz
Pennsylvania State University, PA·Engineering
Anything with spinning blades, a helicopter rotor, a drone propeller, a wind turbine, even a blood pump in an artificial heart, leaves behind a swirling trail of air or fluid called a wake. The wake determines how efficiently and safely the device runs, but testing a full-size rotor is expensive.
- Fields
Engineering
Physics
- Topics
rotor aerodynamics
vortex wake
wake turbulence
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jun 2028
What they work on
- Test whether rotor thrust and induced power coefficient, rather than total power coefficient, are sufficient conditions for reproducing vortex wake turbulence and stability when a rotor is scaled down for wind tunnel testing.
- Design scaled rotor blades using inverse blade design, working backward from target aerodynamic loading to blade geometry, so that small-scale models match the loading of full-size rotors.
- Simulate rotary system wakes with Large Eddy Simulation using actuator lines and with blade-resolved hybrid Unsteady Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes/Large Eddy Simulation, and compare predicted wake structure against measurements.
- Measure rotor loads and wake behavior in three wind tunnels, a compressed-air tunnel for Reynolds-number-dependent roughness and rotational effects, a boundary-layer tunnel for sheared turbulent inflow and platform motion, and an aerodynamic tunnel for blade loads and wake stability.
More about the research
Engineers would like to put a small model in an affordable wind tunnel and trust that what they see also describes the full-size machine. The catch is knowing which quantities must be matched between model and full scale for the wake to behave the same way.
Why it matters
If thrust and induced power turn out to be the right quantities to match, engineers could validate new rotor designs, for helicopters, drones, propellers, and wind turbines, in small, inexpensive wind tunnels instead of full-scale facilities, lowering the cost of development and testing. The public database of wake measurements and simulations would give designers and modelers a shared reference for how rotating wakes scale.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Leonardo Chamorro
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, IL·Engineering
Test whether matching rotor thrust and induced power coefficient reproduces vortex wake turbulence and stability across scales, using inverse blade design and Large Eddy Simulation with actuator lines.
Jane Bae
California Institute of Technology, CA·Engineering·Early-career
Analyze high-resolution flow data to determine how the directionality (anisotropy) of unresolved small-scale turbulent motion behaves in attached and separating flows near walls.
Chao Sun
Louisiana State University, LA·Engineering
Develop a multi-fidelity model based on large eddy simulation, a technique that computes large turbulent swirls in a flow, to simulate how floating offshore wind turbines respond to combined wind, wave, current and wake flows.
The school
Pennsylvania State University: 60 labs on PI Pages, $1.3B a year on research, 743 research doctorates a year.
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