Undergraduate thesis on propeller-wing/fuselage interference

[Demetrio Cucarella]

Hi Brandon,

My name is Demetrio Cucarella, and I am an undergraduate Aerospace Engineering student at the National University of La Plata (UNLP), Argentina, currently in the process of defining the topic for my final degree thesis (Trabajo Final de Grado).

I am reaching out to you specifically because your work on propeller-wing aerodynamics for the X-57 Maxwell program—including the high-lift propeller wind tunnel testing and model development—and your continued contributions to OpenVSP are closely aligned with the research direction I am considering for my thesis.

My thesis is required to include an experimental wind tunnel campaign, complemented by preliminary design and computational methods. The facilities and tools available to me are:

- A low-Reynolds-number wind tunnel capable of measuring complete aerodynamic loads (forces and moments) via a balance system, suited for 2D/3D models such as airfoils, wings, or small UAV configurations.
- A larger subsonic wind tunnel that accommodates full 3D bodies, with a Mach number limit of 0.15.
- Preliminary design tools such as OpenVSP, USAF Digital DATCOM, and similar low-order aerodynamic prediction methods.
- CFD capabilities (RANS-based solvers) to complement and extend the experimental and preliminary-design results.

Given these resources, I would like my thesis to address a problem that is genuinely relevant to current aeronautics research. I have been following some of NASA's recent low-speed aerodynamics work, such as the propeller-wing interaction testing of the tiltwing model in the 14x22-Foot Subsonic Tunnel for Advanced Air Mobility applications, and the RAVEN subscale eVTOL research aircraft program, and I believe my available facilities could be well suited to explore related questions at a smaller, academic scale.

My current thesis idea is to characterize propeller-wing and/or propeller-fuselage aerodynamic interference experimentally, and to evaluate how well potential-flow-based methods—specifically actuator disk and blade element momentum models, as implemented in OpenVSP/VSPAERO—are able to reproduce that interference. The goal is to identify the range of conditions (advance ratio, relative propeller-wing/fuselage position, angle of attack, and possibly tilt angle) over which the potential-flow approach remains reliable, and where it starts to break down compared to wind tunnel data and complementary CFD analysis.

That said, this is a working idea rather than a fixed plan, and I am genuinely open to other research directions you might consider a better fit for the facilities described above.

I would deeply appreciate any guidance on the following:

1. Are there open research questions or specific configurations within propeller-wing/fuselage interference work that would be worth investigating at an academic scale with the facilities described above?
2. Are there published reports, open datasets, validation geometries, or known regimes where actuator disk/BEM methods are known to lose fidelity that could help orient this study?
3. Are there other open problems in this space that might be a better fit for these facilities?
4. If there is a more appropriate point of contact, I would be grateful if you could redirect me.

I am only looking for publicly available research directions or open literature.

Thank you very much for your time.

Demetrio Cucarella
Undergraduate Aerospace Engineering Student
Universidad Nacional de La Plata (UNLP), Argentina