M4 Engineering Inc., a leading Aerospace Engineering firm in the field of conceptual aircraft design, analysis and development received a $518,789 grant on August, 24th 2018. The contract was issued by NASA for the purpose of continued development of Physics-Based Weight Prediction software, M4 Structures Studio (formerly PBWeight).

The goal of the project is to extend the M4 Structures Studio (M4SS) software to support rotorcraft and eVTOL features and applications. Funding was allocated to pursue the following tasks:

- A suite of rotorcraft features will be developed to support the analysis of a variety of configurations.

- Develop functionality to support automated workflows within an MDAO framework.

- Six unique demonstration applications showcasing different capabilities developed during the Phase III.

- Various updates will be made to the software package to improve speed and accuracy.

The principal investigator for this effort will be Tyler Winter, Manager of Research and Development at M4.

Dr. Myles L. Baker, President, M4 Engineering commented on this award: “We are excited to continue working with NASA to develop tools and technologies that will enable the next generation of aircraft configurations. Using the physics-based approach taken in M4SS allows users to predict the weight and apply this to new kinds of vehicles. It really improves the way things are currently done.”

This is especially important in this aviation renaissance, as recent advances in electric propulsion make it possible to design totally new types of aircraft, where previous methods used don’t apply very well. With the large and rapid influx of emerging UAM concepts, NASA continues to advance the state-of-the-art in aerospace conceptual design by investing in technology to accelerate the structural analysis and weight prediction process.

“It is a such an exciting and timely opportunity to expand M4 Structures Studio’s analysis capability and broaden the application domain to include rotorcraft and eVTOL configurations”, added Tyler Winter.