Investigation on the vortical interference between typical rotor configurations and a tilting wing in an electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft

Tilt-wing electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft encounters complex aerodynamic challenges due to strong unsteady interactions between rotor wakes and wing surfaces during transitional flight phases, necessitating high-fidelity numerical investigations to uncover the underlying vortical interference mechanisms associated with typical rotor configurations. To this end, an in-house lattice Boltzmann method-based numerical framework is developed and implemented on a desktop-class multi-graphics processing unit platform, allowing large-scale simulations involving more than 300 × 106 grid points. This framework is employed to investigate the unsteady vortical interference between three representative eVTOL rotor configurations and a tilting wing. The results indicate that during climb, rotor-wing aerodynamic interference is pronounced in the single-rotor-based configuration, leading to strongly varying vortices along the wingspan, which can be moderately alleviated by incorporating swirl recovery vanes, while the counter-rotating open rotor (CROR) configuration shifts the interference region below the wing and responds sensitively to tilt angle. At cruise conditions, all configurations exhibit intensified interference due to reduced wake confinement. Moreover, for the configurations investigated, in the climb phase, single-rotor setups produce concentrated negative lift at the wingtip under large tilt angles, whereas CROR induces globally distributed wing load. During cruise, increasing wing tilt angle significantly exacerbates wing load for all setups. These findings highlight the importance of considering both local and global structural loads when designing tilt-wing eVTOLs for transitional flight conditions.