Industrial validation of CFD solvers on medium and large helicopter fuselages

Abstract

The paper deals with the validation of three different CFD solvers, in use at EUROCOPTER, on two test cases: a medium and a large helicopter fuselage. The validation activity is being carried out within the Franco-German bi-national research project CHANCE. After a brief description of the three RANS flow solvers, the validation activity results have been reported. The validation results have been structured in two main parts. The first part presents a comparison between the CFD results and the wind tunnel measurements about the isolated fuselage of the EC 145 medium weight helicopter fuselage in level flight conditions at medium flight speed. The multi-block structured RANS code FLOWer and the unstructured RANS code TAU developed by DLR have been used for this analysis. This section documents the continuation with respect to the validation activity. The second part of the paper presents a shape effect analysis on all aerodynamic coefficients of the isolated fuselage of a large transport helicopter. The effect of the engine cowling has been computed by CFD and compared with existing wind tunnel data. This study has been carried out by applying the elsA multi-block structured RANS flow solver developed by ONERA.