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ACTA AERONAUTICAET ASTRONAUTICA SINICA ›› 2015, Vol. 36 ›› Issue (9): 2874-2883.doi: 10.7527/S1000-6893.2014.0314

• Fluid Mechanics and Flight Mechanics • Previous Articles     Next Articles

Computational research on aerodynamic characteristics of helicopter main-rotor/tail-rotor/vertical-tail interaction

YE Zhou, XU Guohua, SHI Yongjie   

  1. National Key Laboratory of Science and Technology on Rotorcraft Aeromechanics, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing 210016, China
  • Received:2014-09-26 Revised:2014-11-12 Online:2015-09-15 Published:2015-10-13
  • Supported by:

    National Natural Science Foundation of China (11302103); Aeronautical Science Foundation of China (20135752055)

Abstract:

A computational method based on computational fluid dynamics (CFD) technology is developed for helicopter main-rotor/tail-rotor/vertical-tail interaction analysis. In the present method, Navier-Stokes equations are utilized as the control equations. For the spatial and time discretization, the second-order upwind Roe scheme and implicit LU-SGS (Lower-Upper Symmetric Gauss-Seidel) scheme are used respectively, and the B-L (Baldwin-Lomax) model is used as the turbulence model. Moving embedded grid method is applied to exchanging the flowfield information among the grids of main-rotor, tail-rotor and vertical-tail. By the method developed, example calculations on the flowfield of well-known Helishape 7A rotors and Lynx tail rotors are performed, and the validity of the present method is demonstrated by comparing the calculated results with available experimental data. Then, numerical simulations for main-rotor/tail-rotor aerodynamic interference are made. Furthermore, taking vertical tail interaction into consideration, tail-rotor/vertical-tail and main-rotor/tail-rotor/vertical-tail interaction calculations are conducted to investigate the interaction mechanism between main rotor, tail rotor and vertical tail. It is shown that, for different vertical-tail/tail-rotor configurations, a larger blockage area always leads to a greater tail-rotor trust, but a smaller clean trust of vertical tail and tail rotor. In addition, the clean tail-rotor trusts of "push configuration" are always higher than those of the "pull configuration" for different blockage areas. It is also shown that, vertical tail has little influences on main-rotor/tail-rotor interaction in forward flight.

Key words: aerodynamic interaction, embedded grid, Navier-Stokes equation, helicopter, computational fluid dynamics

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