Compressible potential flow around a helicopter rotor in arbitrary motion

Abstract

To consider compressible transonic flow effects a vortex lattice method for the computation of helicopter rotor flow is coupled with a field panel method. For this purpose Cartesian grids are used which are not adapted to the contour and only discretise the domain of the nonlinear flow. The basis of this procedure is the separation of the full potential equation into the Laplacian operator and the nonlinear terms. Several methods, including the panel-clustering technique are presented to reduce the computational effort of the method. The developed program ROFPM is validated at several experimental test cases of the Caradonna rotor.