Congratulations to Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) doctoral student Emin Burak Onat, CEE doctoral student Shangqing (Albert) Cao,E Electrical Engineering and Computer Science undergraduate student Raiyan Rizwan, CEE doctoral student Xuan Jiang, CEE Professor Mark Hansen, CEE Professor Raja Sengupta, and Lead Aerospace Research Engineer at Supernal Anjan Chakrabarty on winning the best paper award in the Trajectories and Networks track at ICRAT (11th International Conference on Research in Air Transportation) last week at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.
The paper, "A simulation-optimization framework for developing wind-resilient AAM networks," investigates the impact of variation in wind patterns on the fleet sizing, flight scheduling, and charging policy design for Urban Air Mobility (UAM) operations. The study reveals how wind conditions significantly affect eVTOL operations. By processing 5 years of historical wind data at 1500 AGL over the SF Bay Area and integrating this into our framework (without losing spatial and temporal impact of wind), we demonstrated that wind speed, direction and their variation drastically influence energy consumption and the required fleet size to serve the same demand, compared to no wind conditions. For instance, the difference between headwind and tailwind can increase energy consumption by up to 42% on a 100-mile trip for 18% of the year. This work highlights the need for wind considerations in all related UAM system analyses and optimizations.