Dufour Aerospace secures grant support from Innosuisse for wind tunnel test campaign

Dufour Aero­space has received a grant from Swiss inno­va­tion agency Inno­su­isse for a wind tun­nel test cam­paign, which will help ver­i­fy the aero­dy­nam­ic design of its manned tilt-wing eVTOL air­craft aEro3.

The project will be led by Dufour’s Head Aero­dy­nam­i­cist Felix Rubin, who will con­firm the air­craft’s behav­iour through the full flight enve­lope — in par­tic­u­lar the tran­si­tion regimes. He will be super­vised by advi­sors Pro­fes­sor Dr. Leonar­do Man­fri­ani and Dr. Pier­lui­gi Capone — from aca­d­e­m­ic part­ners Zurich Uni­ver­si­ty of Applied Sci­ences (ZHAW) and ETH Zurich.

In a press release, Dufour Aero­space explained: “The wind tun­nel test cam­paign builds on our expe­ri­ence with pre­vi­ous small-scale wind tun­nel tests, and our VTOL tech­nol­o­gy demon­stra­tor flight test­ing.

“The aero­dy­nam­ic effects dur­ing the tran­si­tion phase between ver­ti­cal take off and cruise, and from cruise back to hov­er, are dif­fi­cult to ful­ly pre­dict with con­ven­tion­al cal­cu­la­tion and sim­u­la­tion meth­ods. This is due to tran­sient aero­dy­nam­ic phe­nom­e­na, flow detach­ments and pro­peller slip­stream inter­ac­tions.”

The results from these tests will be used to refine the design of the aEro 3, its aero­dy­nam­ic mod­els and con­trol laws.

This lat­est announce­ment fol­lows on from Dufour Aero­space com­plet­ing the first phase of its VTOL demon­stra­tor flight test­ing, which built on the expe­ri­ence gained from its aer­o­bat­ic plane aEro1. Alto­geth­er, it has now com­plet­ed more than 550 test flights.