Abstract

To numerically simulate aerodynamics of rotor-airframe interaction in a rigorous manner, we need to solve the Navier-Stokes system for a rotor-airframe combination in a single computational domain. This imposes a computational burden since rotating blades and a stationary body have to be simultaneously dealt with. An efficient alternative is a momentum source method in which the action of rotor is approximated as momentum source in a stationary mesh system built around the airframe. This makes the simulation much easier. The magnitude of the momentum source is usually evaluated by the blade element theory, which often results in a poor accuracy. In the present work, we evaluate the momentum source from the simulation data by using the Navier-Stokes equations only for a rotor system. Using this data, we simulated the time-averaged steady rotor-airfame interaction and developed the unsteady rotor-airframe interaction. Computations were carried out for the simplified rotor-airframe model (the Georgia Tech configuration) and the results were compared with experimental data. The results were in good agreement with experimental data, suggesting that the present approach is a usefull method for rotor-airframe interaction analysis.

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