Ph.D. Thesis “Development of design tools and methods for box-wing airplanes and application of the PrandtlPlane concept to a short-medium range aircraft” by Dr. Karim Abu Salem is now available on ETD portal.

This dissertation focuses on the study of the innovative PrandtlPlane aircraft. The PrandtlPlane is the application in aeronautical engineering of an unconventional aerodynamic concept based on the Best Wing System theory, postulated by Prandtl one century ago; the lifting system of this configuration is a box-wing properly designed to minimise the induced drag. The study […]

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A new paper published in Applied Sciences (MDPI): “A Conceptual Design Methodology for e-VTOL Aircraft for Urban Air Mobility” (Open Access)

Recent progress of electric systems has raised attention towards hybrid-electric and full-electric aircraft. Nevertheless, the current low battery energy density limits the application of these propulsive architectures to large transport aircraft. In the context of the general aviation category, full-electric aircraft for the so-called Urban Air Mobility scenario are gaining increasing interest. These air taxis, […]

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A new paper published in Thin-Walled Structures (Elsevier): “Multi-scale deterministic optimisation of blended composite structures: case study of a box-wing”

This work presents a multi-scale design methodology for the deterministic optimisation of thin-walled composite structures integrating a global–local approach for the assessment of the buckling strength and a dedicated strategy to recover blended stacking sequences. The methodology is based on the multi-scale two-level optimisation strategy for anisotropic materials and structures. In the first step, focused […]

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