Development, Modeling and Performance Analysis of an Electric VTOL Aircraft With Tiltable Rotors

Weber State University

In this paper, the development and modeling of an electric Vertical-Take-Off-and Landing (eVTOL) aircraft with tiltable rotors. The front two rotors have tilting capability for transition flight from vertical take-off to forward-direction level flight. This paper focuses on the design and analysis of an eVTOL aircraft platform. The study includes layout and system architecture, the selections and optimization of components, such as electric motors, batteries, and controllers, as well as the integration of these components into the overall aircraft system. In addition, the dynamical model is derived as a nonlinear differential equation. Afterwards, a linearization-based model and Linear Parameter-Varying (LPV) model embedding from nonlinear model are presented. The study provides insights into the system-level design and analysis of VTOL aircraft. Future work includes the trajectory planning and control system design, as well as the simulation/experimental validations using the eVTOL aircraft platform.