Development of Virtual Blade Model for Modelling Helicopter Rotor Downwash in OpenFOAM

Abstract

This report documents the development of a computational model to simulate the complex flow induced by helicopter rotors, using an open-source computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code, OpenFOAMTM. This computational code is now being used to perform large-scale multi-physics simulations of the flow field around helicopters including exhaust plumes and their airframe impingement. The rotor downwash model was validated against available experimental data on rotor-fuselage interactions published by the Georgia Institute of Technology. The OpenFOAM predicted result was also shown to compare favourably with ANSYS Fluent predictions.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Dec 01, 2013
Accession Number
ADA603409

Entities

People

  • Stefano Wahono

Organizations

  • Defence Science and Technology Group

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Air Platforms

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Aircrafts
  • Airframes
  • Boundary Layer
  • Buoyancy
  • Computational Fluid Dynamics
  • Computational Science
  • Computer Programming
  • Computer Programs
  • Computers
  • Fluid Dynamics
  • Fluid Flow
  • Fluid Mechanics
  • Fuselages
  • Helicopter Rotors
  • Hydrodynamics
  • Mechanical Properties
  • Rotary Wing Aircraft

Readers

  • Aerospace Engineering
  • Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD)