Design of Ride Quality Analysis Framework and Application to Urban Air Mobility

A new market of Urban Air Mobility (UAM) vehicles is emerging and ride quality may be considered as one of the key factors to insure a successful introduction. In the scope of this thesis, a framework was developed to evaluate ride quality with respect to UAM vehicles. The framework includes modules for ride quality assessment, seat transfer and elastic airframe dynamics. These modules were optimized for UAM application by extending the validated frequency range, identifying new seat transfer functions and applying modal analysis. Using the framework, Whole-Body Vibration (WBV) of the demonstrators CityAirbus and Vahana was evaluated according to ISO 2631-1. The UAM evaluation showed that, during hover flight, the interaction of the rotor blade wake with the airframe introduces the most dominant perceived vibration. As well, low frequency beating vibration was identified in all translational axes due to different rotational speeds of the individual decoupled rotors. Using amplitude modulation, it was confirmed that beating is likely to lower the expected comfort perception as a result of the high sensitivity at low frequencies.Aerospace Engineerin