A conceptual method to assess ship-helicopter dynamic interface

Abstract

The combined operation of a ship and a helicopter is ubiquitous in every naval organization. The operation of a ship in combination with the landing and take-off operations of a helicopter results in a very complex flow phenomenon. This is due to the presence of ship airwakes, strong velocity gradients and widely varying turbulence length scales. An accurate assessment of the resultant flow phenomena is an outstanding challenge for naval architects as well as researchers. A conceptual method to gain insight into the combined ship-helo flow phenomena over a helodeck is presented. The prime objective of this work is to develop an economical design tool employing both experimental as well as computational techniques to simulate the ship-helicopter coupled environment regime at early design stages reasonably well so as to ease the burden of expensive and risky sea trials. For this purpose, a simplified dynamic interface (SDI) model is proposed to investigate the coupled effects of ship airwake and helicopter rotor downwash. The paper reports a parametric analysis to study the coupled ship-helo airwake behaviour and its impact on helicopter fuselage over the ship helodeck for different ship speed regimes by the proposed SDI model. Further, an attempt has been made to set up preliminary design criteria to grade the ship-helicopter interface for ensuring minimum standards of safe helo operations. Finally, we discuss the impact of the coupled flow dynamics in terms of induced fuselage drag, cross-flow characteristics, rotor plane wake and velocity gradients existing over the helodeck region and evaluate the proposed design criteria.