Conceptual Design Structural Sizing for Urban Air Mobility

View Video Presentation: https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2021-1722.vid Structural layout and weight are critical elements of aircraft conceptual design. Often the details of these aspects of design are relegated to later in the design cycle and require significant effort to produce accurate results. While empirical formulations exist for many classes of aircraft, they are not accurate for novel concepts. With the great interest in urban air mobility, electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL), and other concepts, a new tool has been developed to aid in structural weight estimation in early design. M4 Structures Studio (M4SS), a tool to parametrically define the structural configuration for aircraft and quickly estimate structural weight, has been enhanced to support the modeling of rotorcraft structures. Preliminary sizing results are presented for a NASA Urban Air Mobility concept [1].