GoFly VTOL Personal Air Vehicle
Sponsors: Brad Worsham ‘88, TEES, and Army Research Laboratory
Dr. Moble Benedict led a team (Harmony) comprising of graduate students from AVFL and two collaborators from NASA Ames and Langley to compete in the Boeing GoFly Prize, a 2-year, $2 million international competition to build a vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) capable personal air vehicle that is safe, quiet, and ultra-compact. The team won both first (conceptual design) and second (sub-scale demonstration) phases of this challenge (among top 5) competing with 3,500 innovators from 101 countries. Harmony is also the only university-based team to be in the top 5 from the US. The 750-pound gross weight (with 200-pound payload) all-electric coaxial rotorcraft that the team designed and built has a rotor diameter of 8.2 feet (footprint area of a Smart car) and measured a noise level of 73 dBA (as quiet as a washing machine) at 50 feet during take-off. Here are the video links to our full-scale model and the 22-pound 1/3rd scale model.
The salient features of our design are:
- Compact coaxial rotor system uniquely designed for low noise and hover/forward-flight efficiency
- Stiff rotor design for extreme agility, gust tolerance and high speed
- Robust “fly-by-wire” vehicle control through first ever electronically-coupled dual swash plate system
- A custom-designed 200-pound, 11 kW-hr, 600V air-cooled battery pack
- Ultralight, high strength-to-weight carbon fiber blades
- An efficient lightweight thermal management system for the 55 HP motors and invertors, via liquid cooling
Students: David Coleman, Farid Saemi, Hunter Denton, Carl Runco, Atanu Halder, Bochan Lee