Accurate Predictions of Rotor Hover Performance at Low and High Disc Loadings

Abstract

This paper presents evidence on the ability of modern computational fluid dynamics methods to accurately predict hover performance of rotors with modest computer resources. The paper uses two well-studied blades, the S-76 main rotor blade and the XV-15 tiltrotor blade. The results are compared with experiments and show that the performance is well predicted. In addition, the employed computational fluid dynamics method was able to capture the effects of the tip Mach number, tip shape, blade aeroelasticity, and flow transition on the performance of the blade as well as on the wake structure and the rotor acoustics.