Helicopter Quieting
Abstract
(U) Studies and analysis of military helicopter operations have shown that the survivability and lethality of U.S. helicopters can be increased by reducing the range at which their acoustic signature can be detected and recognized. The goal of the Helicopter Quieting program is to advance the capability for analytical development of advanced rotor technologies that will dramatically enhance the survivability of military rotor systems while enabling improvements to performance, affordability, availability and suitability. A critical element toward this goal is to create and demonstrate a physics-based toolset that enables analytical design of novel rotor systems and rotorcraft for reduced acoustic susceptibility (detection and recognition) by human and electro-acoustic threats. (U) Current rotor development is very costly involving a time-consuming iterative, trial and error cycle of analysis and model wind tunnel tests, or occasionally, a faster but much riskier analysis path directly to full-scale wind tunnel/flight test. Additionally, the primary limitation of existing computational models is their inability to accurately predict the pressure distribution on a rotor blade and in the flowfield away from the blade. Novel and creative concepts and ideas are being employed in this program for accurate aerodynamic analysis of helicopter rotor airloading, flowfield, and wakes using high-end computational fluid dynamics techniques. The program will develop tools capable of accurately predicting noise signature of advanced rotor concepts that exhibit a significant reduction in low-frequency in-plane signatures. (U) The Helicopter Quieting program will also optimize survivability by developing propagation and perception modeling for rotorcraft acoustic signatures within state-of-the-art visualization architectures. Multiple advanced human perception and cueing models will be developed as a part of the integrated acoustic design and analysis environment. The ability of the toolset to accurately characterize the differences in these factors will support design decisions for advanced rotors and rotorcraft that exhibit dramatically reduced perceptibility. The toolset will also enable assessment of operational tactics, techniques, and procedures, to include pilot technique, toward optimization for survivability.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Accomplishment
- Publication Date
- Oct 01, 2011
- Source ID
- a5951cd998bfe033c506cd65097c2109
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- Root: TACTICAL TECHNOLOGY