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A direct solution to Global Warming would be to reflect a part of sunlight back into Space. A system tradeoff study is being developed with three of the concepts that are being evaluated as long-endurance high-altitude reflectors. The first concept is a high aspect ratio solar powered flying wing towing reflector sheets. This concept is named “Flying Carpet”. Second is a centrifugally stretched high altitude solar reflector (CSHASR). The CSHASR has 4 rotors made of reflector sheets with a hub stretching to 60 percent of the radius, held together by an ultralight quad-rotor structure. Each rotor is powered by a solar-electric motor. A variation on this concept, forced by nighttime descent rate concerns, is powered by tip-mounted solar panels and propellers with some battery storage augmenting rotational inertia as well as energy storage. The third concept is an Aerostatically Balanced Reflector (ABR) sheet, held up by hydrogen balloons.

This paper brings together three special aspects of bluff-body aeromechanics. Experiments using our Continuous Rotation method have developed a knowledge base on the 6-degree-of-freedom aerodynamic loads on over 50 different configurations including parametric variations of canonical shapes, and several practical shapes of interest. Models are mounted on a rod attached to a stepper motor placed on a 6-DOF load cell in a low speed wind tunnel. The aerodynamic loads are ensemble-averaged as phase-resolved azimuthal variations. The load component variations are obtained as discrete Fourier series for each load component versus azimuth about each of 3 primary axes. This capability has enabled aeromechanical simulation of the dynamics of roadable vehicles slung below rotorcraft. In this paper, we explore the genesis of the loads on a CONEX model, as well as models of a short and long container, using the “ROTCFD” family of unstructured Navier-Stokes solvers.