What is it about?

This paper deals with the design of smart rotor blades that are used on marine helicopter to control the sailing phenomenon that flexible rotors experience during their engage/disengage operations when operating from ships and frigates. A simulation package is developed to predict such a behaviour and the paper reports on experimental verification of this simulation package.

Featured Image

Why is it important?

Based on experimental and simulation data, conclusions are drawn regarding the influence of the aerodynamic environment and the rotor operation parameters on the rotor blade elastic deflections during the engagement/disengagement phase. It is concluded that the parameters of the engagement/disengagement profile play a minimal role in the occurrence of large elastic deflections, known as the blade sailing phenomenon. Increasing or decreasing the collective pitch setting along with increasing the wind speed and ship deck roll angle is found to amplify the blade sailing phenomenon. Additionally, it is further verified that, compared to an unsteady aerodynamic model, the nonlinear quasi-steady aerodynamic model with Mach number effects on the stall point is sufficient for blade sailing studies; however, the former is shown to be more accurate, particularly at higher wind speeds. The experimental data are also used to successfully validate developed multibody dynamics tools.

Read the Original

This page is a summary of: Design, Simulation, and Experimental Results for Flexible Rotors in a Ship Airwake, Journal of Aircraft, January 2016, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA),
DOI: 10.2514/1.c033322.
You can read the full text:

Read

Contributors

The following have contributed to this page