Propeller Aerodynamics for Advanced Air Mobility: Fundamentals and Integration Effects

Dr. Tomas Sinnige is an assistant professor at the Flight Performance and Propulsion group at Delft University of Technology. His research focuses on rotor-airframe and rotor-rotor aerodynamic and acoustic interactions for future aircraft configurations, with a special focus on experimental analysis of propellers. Previously, he obtained MSc and PhD degrees at the same university, working on the aerodynamics and aeroacoustics of tip-mounted propellers. He has taken part in European projects focused on propeller research. Furthermore, he graduated MSc students on the topic of propeller interactional aerodynamics and aeroacoustics, and published papers in international journals and conferences. In his current role, he is also the responsible lecturer of the MSc course on Experimental Simulations.

Dr. Nando van Arnhem is Aerodynamics Lead Engineer at the start-up company Vaeridion. He is also guest researcher at the Faculty of Aerospace Engineering of Delft University of Technology. Previously, he obtained BSc, MSc, and PhD degrees at the same university. Nando has performed over five years of research in the Clean Sky 2 research framework for regional and large passenger aircraft, where he assessed propeller-installation effects on various aircraft configurations by performing over a dozen wind-tunnel tests, by performing CFD simulations, and by developing lower-order models. Besides his interest in propulsion-integration, Nando has worked on and piloted various scaled-flight demonstrators of novel aircraft configurations.

Dr. Reynard de Vries is Program Manager for New Aircraft Technologies at Panta Holdings, and a visiting researcher at the Faculty of Aerospace Engineering of Delft University of Technology. He obtained a BSc degree in Aerospace Engineering from the Technical University of Madrid in 2014 and subsequently pursued an MSc degree in Aerospace Engineering at Delft University of Technology, which he obtained with distinction in 2016. Reynard has performed five years of research in the European Commission’s Clean Sky 2 framework for large passenger aircraft, where he has worked on conceptual design methods for hybrid-electric aircraft and propeller-wing aerodynamics in distributed-propulsion systems as a part of his PhD research. He has been actively involved in numerous wind-tunnel tests of various (distributed-) propeller configurations and has taught several lectures on hybrid/electric aircraft design. Reynard is a member of the AIAA Electrified Aircraft Technology Technical Committee.







Prof. Juergen Rauleder teaches and conducts research at the School of Aerospace Engineering of the Georgia Institute of Technology. Dr. Rauleder’s research interests are the experimental and applied numerical aerodynamics, with a focus on interactional aerodynamics, coupled aerodynamics with flight dynamics, as well as active, shape-adaptive rotating and fixed wings. His basic research is applied to the aerodynamic design and understanding of current and future vertical lift configurations, including advanced (urban) aerial mobility and UAS, as well as pilot training and simulators. Juergen’s research is sponsored by the U.S. Army, Navy, NASA, ONR, NATO, the EU, and by industry. He received a Masters from the University of Stuttgart and a PhD from the University of Maryland under the guidance of Prof. Gordon Leishman. Juergen serves on the AIAA Applied Aerodynamics Committee, and he is the Chair of the VFS Aerodynamics Technical Committee.