Air Race E - Winning the RAeS Design Competition

Electric planes taking to the sky for a fierce battle? Sounds extremely cool!

And this "Nascar racing in the sky" is about to become very real, as various teams are developing custom race planes as we speak. To spice up the level of innovation even further in this new field, the Royal Aeronautical Society launched a design competition for electric planes to take part in a virtual competition. The goals were clear:

1. Convince a panel of experts that the design was realistic and reasonable.

2. Set the fastest race time, covering 5 laps from a standing start on the runway.

The virtual lap times were set using a model of the design in the X-Plane 11 flight simulator.

The "Garner GR-2 Iontrepid" design, developed by X-Aerodynamics, took the win. Next to eternal fame, they were awarded an AirShaper CFD simulation to validate their design. CEO Cameron Garner explains:

"X-Plane is a real-time simulator and it has a predictive flight model that determines aircraft performance in real-time. However, it cannot do a thorough CFD analysis fast enough for real-time simulation, that much computational power is not yet available. Instead, it uses simpler equations, approximations, and some pre-computed data (such as airfoil polars) to get a very respectable accuracy and it can do its analysis hundreds of times per second!

X-Plane is a tool that is very useful for predicting an aircraft’s performance, but like any simulation tool, it has its limitations that designers utilizing it need to understand and allow for. In addition, in order to achieve realistic results, designers need to be able to provide X-Plane with accurate data to work with. This requires the use of other tools to pre-compute and analyse elements of the design to determine suitable inputs for the simulator.

The Airshaper CFD analysis of the aircraft confirmed that the GR-2 aircraft is very aerodynamically efficient, but also highlighted where improvements can be made, such as correcting the alignment of cooling inlets to the local airflow (to avoid creating separation and drag). The analysis also showed that the total drag is probably a bit higher than X-Plane itself predicts. The latter is not entirely unexpected – the mixing flows at the intersection of parts such as wings and fuselage is difficult to simulate on a computer, so X-Plane’s fast simulation cannot determine it and requires that the designer input reasonable drag values – my initial estimates were probably a little low. This highlights how good CFD data can drive improvements in the X-Plane model to maximize realism."

Are you working on a plane yourself or are you curious to learn how AirShaper works? Then visit AirShaper.com or have just a look at this video!