Project summary

The AURORA project aims to generate design criteria and methods for designing Innovative Air Mobility solutions powered by Fuel Cell Systems for which there are no clear nor feasible pure battery-powered alternatives due to weight, endurance, or range constraints.

Motivation and background

The aviation industry plays a crucial role in our interconnected world, facilitating global trade, fostering tourism, and enabling people to connect across vast distances. However, this vital industry is also a significant contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, with aviation responsible for a substantial portion of anthropogenic radiative forcing. In this context, the development of net zero aeronautical technologies in Europe emerges as a pivotal undertaking, offering the promise of reducing carbon emissions and ushering in a more sustainable future for air travel.

Objectives

TODO

Methodology

TODO

TODO

Infrastructure

CMT-UPV “Professor Francisco Payri” Wind Tunnel (2.8 x 2.8 x 22 m, up to 33 m/s).
Fuell cell laboratories, including a full-system stand with 200 kW of capacity.
HPC Clusters for high-fidelity simulations.

latest posts

Feb 02, 2026	First journal paper published
Oct 11, 2025	Student visit
Sep 01, 2025	Néstor Alcañiz Brull joins AURORA!

selected publications

Journal
Numerical Analysis on the Influence of Rotor Configuration on Quad-Rotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Flight Performance

Brendan H. P. Mullen, Pau Varela Martínez, Jorge García-Tíscar, and Luis Miguel García-Cuevas

Drones, 2026

Abs DOI Bib PDF

While fixed, unactuated rotor tilt is increasingly utilised in commercial multi-rotor unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), its impact on forward flight performance remains poorly documented in the literature. The current work addresses this gap in the literature by systematically quantifying the performance trade-offs of rotor tilt across various airspeeds. Furthermore, a novel rotor configuration is proposed to mitigate some of the tilted rotor configuration’s inherent drawbacks. The different configurations are evaluated using a computationally affordable numerical approach that combines steady-state computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations, a simple proportional–integral (P–I) trimming algorithm, and actuator disk rotor modelling (ADM). The findings reveal that the aircraft’s power requirements can be reduced by more than 29% for airspeeds greater than 20 m/s, while its range can be increased by up to 22% with the alternative rotor configurations. However, the modifications were found to have a significantly lesser impact on endurance, as only a 2.9% increase is noted at best.
@article{drones10020105, author = {Mullen, Brendan H. P. and Varela Martínez, Pau and García-Tíscar, Jorge and García-Cuevas, Luis Miguel}, title = {Numerical Analysis on the Influence of Rotor Configuration on Quad-Rotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Flight Performance}, journal = {Drones}, volume = {10}, year = {2026}, number = {2}, article-number = {105}, issn = {2504-446X}, doi = {10.3390/drones10020105}, }