Abstract: To improve the efficiency of the geometric modeling of composite plies in helicopter rotor blades, a method is presented. First, the typical types of the blade plies are summarized systematically. A parametric composite ply representation scheme is proposed. Designers can specify the ply by an intelligent wizard, which contains a program for converting the user-specified parameters of each ply into a ply design table. Then, according to the blade profile and the ply design table, a geometric model of the ply is constructed by duplicating the current-ply-covered region from the last ply surface and offsetting it by a thickness of the ply. The geometric modeling process of the whole blade can be automatically completed layer by layer in this way. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can complete the geometric modeling of composite blade plies efficiently. 

Key words: helicopters, composite materials, rotors, skin, geometric modeling