Penn State’s Vertical Lift Research Center of Excellence (VLRCOE) is dedicated to advancing vertical lift technologies across areas such as aeromechanics, propulsion, acoustics, and flight dynamics. Penn State is a participant in Analyswift’s Academic Partner Program, allowing no-cost access to VABS and SwiftComp simulation tools into academic research. A team at VLRCOE is using the company’s VABS software along with the open source iVABS framework to enhance the manufacturability of composite rotor blades for helicopters, advanced air mobility platforms, and other rotorcraft.
VABS is a cross-sectional analysis tool used to predict structural properties and evaluate stress, strains, and strength in slender composite structures, including rotor blades, wind turbine blades, propellers, and wings. iVABS builds on this capability by providing an integrated, user-friendly framework for design, optimization, parametric studies, and uncertainty analysis.
“The optimization of rotor blade design plays a critical role in improving overall rotorcraft performance,” said Jiwoo Song, a PhD candidate in aerospace engineering at Penn State. “Recent advancements in computational toolchains, such as iVABS, enable rapid exploration of design spaces while satisfying prescribed performance objectives. The goal of the project is to achieve a design-to-production capability by developing a drastically more manufacturing-aware iVABS blade design framework. Looking ahead, this project aims to move beyond virtual optimization into physical realization, with plans to fabricate a composite rotor blade in collaboration with the Penn State Applied Research Laboratory, validating the computational design process through experimental testing.”
VABS/iVABS is being used to integrate manufacturing constraints directly into the design process, allowing for more realistic geometry parameterization. The blade template incorporates features such as rounded spar corners, trailing-edge airfoil treatments, continuous skin laminates, and spanwise-variable spar thickness. These elements enhance structural accuracy in analysis while ensuring the designs can be more readily translated into manufacturable components.
Dr. Wenbin Yu, CTO of AnalySwift, said, “VABS reduces analysis time from hours to seconds by quickly and easily achieving the accuracy of detailed 3D finite element analysis (FEA) with the efficiency of simple engineering models. With VABS, engineers can calculate the most accurate, complete set of sectional properties such as torsional stiffness, shear stiffness, shear center for composite beams made with arbitrary cross-section and arbitrary material. It can also predict accurate detailed stress distribution for composite beams, which are usually not possible with 3D FEA for realistic composite structures.”