Evaluation of Isolated Fuselage and Rotor-Fuselage Interaction Using CFD

Abstract

The US Army Aeroflightdynamics Directorate (AFDD), the French Office National d'Etudes et de Recherches A rospatiales "ONERA" and the Georgia Institute of Technology "GIT" are working under the United States/France Memorandum of Agreement on Helicopter Aeromechanics to study rotorcraft aeromechanics issues of interest to both nations. As a task under this agreement, a comparative study of the Dauphin 365N helicopter has been undertaken to analyze the capabilities and weaknesses of state-of-the-art computational fluid dynamics (CFD) codes, with the aim of fuselage performance prediction and investigation of rotor-fuselage interaction. Three CFD flow solvers applied on three meshes provide similar results in terms of pressure coefficient. Force predictions vary somewhat. This paper presents details on the grid sensitivity and the low Mach number preconditioning influence. The importance of taking into account the wind tunnel strut and the rotor hub is shown. The pressure coefficients along top and bottom centerlines of the fuselage are in good agreement with the experiment except in the area aft of the hub. There remains a discrepancy between the computed forces and the experimental data due in part to modelling inaccuracies. Rotorfuselage interactions are performed using uniform and non-uniform actuator disk models in order to simulate the rotor downwash.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jun 01, 2004
Accession Number
ADA480630

Entities

People

  • David O'brien
  • Marilyn Smith
  • Mark Potsdam
  • Thomas Renaud

Organizations

  • Office National d'Études et de Recherches Aérospatiales

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Air Platforms
  • Energy and Power Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Actuators
  • Agreements
  • Aircrafts
  • Computational Fluid Dynamics
  • Experimental Data
  • Flow
  • Fluid Dynamics
  • Fluid Flow
  • Helicopters
  • Mach Number
  • Measurement
  • Molecular Dynamics
  • Pressure Distribution
  • Pressure Measurement
  • Reynolds Number
  • Rotary Wing Aircraft
  • Wind Tunnels

Fields of Study

  • Physics

Readers

  • Aerodynamics/Aeronautics.
  • Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD)
  • Small Business Innovation Research Program (SBIR) EDI Research and Innovation.