Jetoptera Completes Fourth USAF Awarded Contract

U.S‑based start­up, Jetoptera, announced last week, it had com­plet­ed a fourth Small Busi­ness Inno­va­tion Research (SBIR) con­tract award­ed by the US Air Force to eval­u­ate its exper­i­men­tal “3‑in‑1” propul­sion sys­tem con­cept, reports a press release.

This sys­tem enables the air­craft to take off and land ver­ti­cal­ly (VTOL), yet accel­er­ate to jet speeds in for­ward flight con­fig­u­ra­tion. Referred to as a “High Speed VTOL (HSVTOL)”, the release states, “The tech­nol­o­gy presents sev­er­al fun­da­men­tal advan­tages over VTOL lega­cy sys­tems, emit­ting low­er, aton­al noise and benign exhaust tem­per­a­tures while elim­i­nat­ing rotors or pro­pellers. It employs reli­able and low main­te­nance tur­bo-com­pres­sors which are easy to adapt from cur­rent reli­able tur­bines.”

The release con­tin­ues, “Jetoptera designed, built and test­ed an Upper Sur­face Blown Wing (USB) equipped pow­ered-high-lift test arti­cle inte­grat­ing a Flu­idic Propul­sive Sys­tem (FPS). The exper­i­men­tal data pro­duced informs the con­cepts crit­i­cal to the deliv­ery of a HSVTOL air­craft con­cep­tu­al design.”

Jetoptera is now prepar­ing to start wind tun­nel tests with a more advanced ver­sion of the Flu­idic Propul­sion Sys­tem seen here being eval­u­at­ed in 2021. (Image: Jetoptera)

The FPS has no vis­i­ble mov­ing parts or pro­pellers. Instead, the tech­nol­o­gy uses a rel­a­tive­ly small flow of com­pressed air from a tur­bo-com­pres­sor to suck in a much greater vol­ume of ambi­ent air, cre­at­ing a vor­tex that sig­nif­i­cant­ly ampli­fies the air­flow through an aero­dy­nam­ic loop. Addi­tion­al thrusters aug­ment the thrust out­put of the FPS. The com­pa­ny says the tech­nol­o­gy is scal­able and can pow­er air­craft with a take­off weight of up to 10,000 lbs. 

Jetoptera part­nered with Scaled Com­pos­ites, a Northrop Grum­man com­pa­ny, for both the air­craft and con­cep­tu­al design of the HSVTOL. A sub­scale mod­el of this con­cep­tion is cur­rent­ly being stud­ied and test­ed in a wind tun­nel.

The recent­ly com­plet­ed USAF con­tract allowed siz­ing, opti­mi­sa­tion of the FPS and USB con­fig­u­ra­tion using sta­t­ic and wind tun­nel data. This expand­ed the data obtained in pre­vi­ous con­tracts.

The team achieved a num­ber of firsts, includ­ing:-

: Test­ing with an elec­tric air com­pres­sor feed­ing the FPS thruster-ejec­tors, which may be used to dis­trib­ute pri­ma­ry air across the air­craft for hybrid or ful­ly elec­tric sys­tems.

: Opti­mi­sa­tion of a high-lift flap sys­tem work­ing with FPS for max­i­mum lift pro­duc­tion.

: Demon­stra­tion of lift coef­fi­cients exceed­ing 8.0 – up to 40 per­cent bet­ter than pro­peller blown wings results obtained under oth­er pro­grams and with low­er noise emis­sion and vibra­tions.

: Deliv­ery of a first of a kind HSVTOL air­craft con­cept that embeds the data-val­i­dat­ed prin­ci­ples honed under this SBIR.

Watch Video:

The con­cep­tu­al air­craft is pre­dict­ed to per­form at Mach num­bers of 0.8. A sep­a­rate, ongo­ing STTR Phase II pro­gram, will val­i­date its design in the first half of 2023. The max­i­mum speeds pre­dict­ed for the con­cept are over twice as fast as a tiltro­tor. Jetoptera has stat­ed the air­craft could be ready to fly in 2025.

AFRL and AFWERX have part­nered to stream­line the Small Busi­ness Inno­va­tion Research process in an attempt to speed up the expe­ri­ence, broad­en the pool of poten­tial appli­cants, and decrease bureau­crat­ic over­head.

Back­ground

Jetoptera has devel­oped “a unique propul­sion sys­tem inte­grat­ed with a nov­el air­frame.” This allows the com­pa­ny to cre­ate lighter, more effi­cient, and less com­plex air­craft. The tech­nol­o­gy enables ver­ti­cal and short take­off and land­ing (V/STOL), high speeds, size­able pay­loads and range along­side maneu­ver­abil­i­ty.

For more infor­ma­tion

https://www.jetoptera.com/

(Top image: Jetoptera)