Consulting

If your aerospace engineering team is in need of more manpower, or simply needs advice and lessons for the tools published by Holbrook Aerospace, we can work in the framework of a retainer or 1099 contract. If you have not purchased the tools that we have available, but still need an engineer work efficiently using the aforementioned tools, we can utilize all of them for the work between us without sharing the tools with you, or requiring the purchase of them. If you have purchased the tools we have available, and you would still like cooperate on projects, we can work together, and share files associated with tools in their raw forms. This way, we can communicate more fundamentally, in the same design ecosystem that empowers Holbrook Aerospace.

Airfoil Optimization

The Holbrook Airfoil Vector Format allows us to use conventional and popular airfoil simulation software as we did before, but with a much more powerful way to describe the shape input into the simulation. Having a detailed library of airfoils in this format educates the optimization algorithm with a complete knowledge of existing shapes, making the optimization much more dynamic, and allowing the optimization to more easily travel through a wider volume of design state space. Beyond running the optimization in the Holbrook format, the end product is also in the same format of the library. Which means it can be used in the same tools, added to the library if desired, and easily compared to all other airfoils in the library, or exported into DAT coordinate format.

Aside from the advantages of using the Holbrook airfoil format as an effective and efficient language to run geometry optimizations under, there is also an expansive options of optimizations types to suit the needs of your project. Besides the obvious objective of increasing the L/D as much as possible at a certain Mach and Re, there are many other optimization types available. L/D can be optimized with a specific CL or angle of attack target. Also, drag can also be maximized or reduced with the same weight on CL or AOA. In all cases, specific airfoil optimizations can have thickness and camber constraints as upper and lower boundaries. Another unique application is the development of analogous airfoils, which can help duplicate the drag polar of existing airfoils at their intended scale, with airfoils of a much smaller chord. This is done with the intent of replicating the scale lift distribution of a blade or wing, with an otherwise apparently unrelated blade or wing shape, at a much smaller scale.

Although there are many exciting ways to use airfoil optimization. It is always advised to avoid designing airfoils before you have a picture of how you entire design will perform. Maximizing L/D, just to find out that your wing crumbles because of how thin it is, is not constructive. Also, having an incredible L/D in your drag polar, which is outside of all the usable portions of your drag polar is not helpful. Airfoil optimization is better suited for trying to improve existing designs that are already functional, but could possibly be improved. Or, for very quick projects where you desire something with the highest coefficient of lift or drag. For more complicated projects that are being designed from the ground up, its better to design the entire wing at once with no targets for airfoil performance. That way you can have fitness functions for the performance of the entire blade or wing. This process is what gives the custom tools we have at Holbrook Aerospace their edge in creating novel and function designs quickly.

Propeller Optimization

Our propeller design tools can take very detailed information about your power sources, including voltage, KV, stator size, resistance, and no load current. If working with combustion, or any other type of power source, raw torque/RPM/Power curves can be used as well.

Just as much detailed information can be included about the different flight conditions the propeller will be performing in. Also, many different types of flight conditions can be used to constrain the design of a single blade, with unique fitness functions for every single flight conditions.

In the cases where you power plant is already chosen, usually a thrust maximization, power targeting optimization will do. Here you can aim to get as much thrust as possible at the power where you motor has ideal power output and efficiently. The other type of useful optimization is a thrust targeting, power reduction optimization, where you can for example, aim to achieve only the thrust require to hover a specific quad copter, while reducing the power as much as possible.

In exotic optimization cases, the powerful geometry language that we use, allows us to answer extremely unique optimization questions. For example, a blade could be optimized for a specific thrust, where the blade radius is itself a variable and the tip chord of the blade is fixed to a certain proportion or the circumference. In other cases, the RPM of the blade, and the airfoils themselves can be weighted to produce as quiet a blade as possible. Our software is especially useful in answering very specific and unique optimization questions.

Because of our experience in designing propellers, we can not only print and test them in house, but we can also guarantee that a portion of the contract be dependant on certain performance goals if you would like to outperform existing options that you have in hand. Having the ability to design, prototype, and test in house makes this an extreme quick process compared to working with other design firms.

Wind Turbine Optimization

Holbrook Aerospace has a great tool for optimizing conventional wind turbines. We can easily simulate up to 40 thousand different blade designs a day, where each simulation includes performance at four different wind speeds. This can create blades that operate well at all airspeeds, and have innovative pitch control solutions. Both stall control and pitch control turbines can be designed. The powerful nature of our geometric language allows the blades themselves to be held to very specific structural constraints that can help ensure that there will be less problems that arise in the later in FEA and physical testing.