Ongoing Projects

Co-investigators: Dr. Shreyas Sundaram (ECE)

Sponsor: University Consortium for Applied Hypersonics (UCAH)

Synopsis: The team applies optimal trajectory generation techniques and the SoS AWB tool suite to hypersonic vehicle missions, allowing multiple hypersonic and conventional vehicles to complete preemptive strike and defensive missions.

 

Principal-investigators: Dr. Daniel DeLaurentis, Dr. William Crossley

Sponsor: The Boeing Company

Synopsis: In collaboration with Boeing, this project leverages Purdue University’s FLEET tool—a large-scale system dynamics-inspired model—to evaluate the impact of novel aircraft architectures on the U.S. aviation market. FLEET integrates key aspects of airline operations, including costs, demand, fleet composition, airport capacity, fuel burn, and emissions, to forecast system-wide behavior over future decades. Through comprehensive scenario analyses, the project helps partners assess how the introduction of new aircraft designs may influence market dynamics, operational strategies, and environmental outcomes. By linking technical aircraft performance with economic and market responses, this research provides a holistic framework for understanding the potential adoption pathways and system-level benefits of next-generation, low-emission aircraft.

 

Principal-investigators: Dr. Daniel DeLaurentis, Dr. William Crossley

Sponsor: Logistics Management Institute, NASA Langley Research Center

Synopsis: The convergence of new technologies, such as electric propulsion, autonomy, and new business models, such as app-based ride sharing, are generating the potential for a new aviation market known as Urban Air Mobility (UAM) to emerge. It is envisioned that UAM may revolutionize mobility within metropolitan areas by enabling a safe, efficient, convenient, affordable, and accessible air transportation system for passengers and cargo. Such an air transportation system could bring aviation into people’s daily lives and provide an augmentation and/or alternative to other ground-based transit modes, such as cars. The UAM market is not likely to appear overnight. Rather, some form of evolutionary approach based on the pace of technology development, infrastructure limitations, societal acceptance, airspace integration, and many other factors may bring us from the current state of the art to the envisioned future state where aviation is a normal part of people’s daily lives. To help NASA’s Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate (ARMD) consider potential near-term applications for passenger-carrying UAM and which issues will be the key “bottlenecks” limiting the scalability of early UAM operations, this task is focused on studying the “operational limits” of near-term UAM applications. The work builds upon previous methodology developments of the Purdue PIs to assess the mobility benefits from CTOL and VTOL operations, at a regional transportation level and with initial “hooks” into urban areas.