Investigation of Aeroelastic Effects for a Helicopter Main Rotor in Hover

Abstract

In the search of new rotorblades with increased performance and reduced noise emissions blade shapes become more and more complex. Due to this phenomenon and the slender form of the blades themselves Fluid-Structure- Interaction (FSI) becomes increasingly important. Therefore an optimization framework with a loose coupling approach in the loop between the block-stuctured 3D Navier- Stokes solver FLOWer and the Comprehensive Rotor Code HOST has been developed. In order to assess the influence of the FSI optimizations are first conducted on a pure aerodynamic basis. In a second step the optimizations are repeated with the same parameter combinations using the full loose coupling procedure. The results are then compared in order to isolate the effects of FSI. Various parameter combinations are analyzed since FSI heavily depends on the planform and therefore on the chosen parameters.