Aerodynamic and acoustic analysis of helicopter main rotor blade tips in hover
International Journal of Numerical Methods for Heat & Fluid Flow
ISSN: 0961-5539
Article publication date: 5 September 2016
Abstract
Purpose
The design of main rotor blade tips is of interest to helicopter manufactures since the tip details affect the performance and acoustics of the rotor. The paper aims to discuss this issue.
Design/methodology/approach
In this paper, computation fluid dynamics is used to simulate the flow around hovering helicopter blades with different tip designs. For each type of blade tip a parametric study on the shape is also conducted for comparison calculations were performed the constant rotor thrust condition. The collective pitch and the cone angles of the blades were determined by at an iterative trimming process.
Findings
Analysis of the distributed blade loads shows that the tip geometry has a significant influence on aerodynamics and aeroacoustics especially for stations where blade loading is high.
Originality/value
The aeroacoustic characteristics of the rotors were obtained using Ffowcs Williams-Hawkings equations.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the “State tasks in the field of scientific activity” Grant No. 9.1694.2014/K.
Citation
Garipova, L.I., Batrakov, A.S., Kusyumov, A.N., Mikhaylov, S.A. and Barakos, G. (2016), "Aerodynamic and acoustic analysis of helicopter main rotor blade tips in hover", International Journal of Numerical Methods for Heat & Fluid Flow, Vol. 26 No. 7, pp. 2101-2118. https://doi.org/10.1108/HFF-08-2015-0348
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2016, Emerald Group Publishing Limited