Roland Feil

Technical University of Munich

Roland Feil is completing his doctoral degree at the Technical University of Munich in Germany, under the advisement of Dr. Juergen Rauleder. His academic concentration is in rotorcraft aeromechanics, specifically that of coaxial rotor systems.

What are some of your current projects or research interests?

My current research is on the aeromechanics analysis of counter-rotating coaxial rotor systems, with a focus on aeromechanics modeling, including performance and load predictions, blade aerodynamics, blade structural dynamics, and rotorcraft design and development. I have been doing research on two different rotor systems, a model-scale high-advance-ratio coaxial rotor system with lift-offset that was tested in hover and wind tunnel operations, and a full-scale ultralight coaxial helicopter during free flight. Whilst I was kindly provided with the test data of the former (to correlate my numerical analysis to), I also helped with the instrumentation of the test demonstrator and with the flight testing of the latter.

What do Roland's mentors have to say?

Independent thinking and creativity together with curiosity and an exploratory drive to think out of the box and follow new ideas and approaches characterize Roland. He has proven these skills by highly independent research work on his PhD project concerning computational modeling and testing of coaxial rotorcraft aeromechanics. His research work on high-advance-ratio rotor aeromechanics goes well beyond the state of the art and is in close collaboration with the Univ of Texas at Austin, and it supports the VLRCOE at the Univ of Maryland. His contributions that are published in the Journal of Aircraft and AHS Journal, and presented at the VFS Forums, are a manifest of his excellent research work. Roland will soon be graduating. While this will be a big loss for the research group, I can only congratulate the company or organization that will hire him (please do not hesitate to contact him or myself if you have job waiting for him!). I have full confidence that he will succeed in his pursuit of an international rotorcraft engineering career and impact on the rotorcraft community.

Dr. Juergen Rauleder
Technical University Munich