Effects of blade aspect ratio and taper ratio on hovering performance of cycloidal rotor with large blade pitching amplitude

Abstract

In recent years, a lot of research work has been carried out on the cycloidal rotors. However, it lacks thorough understanding about the effects of the blade platform shape on the hover efficiency of the cycloidal rotor, and the knowledge of how to design the platform shape of the blades. This paper presents a numerical simulation model based on Unsteady Reynolds-Averaged Navier–Stokes equations (URANSs), which is further validated by the experimental results. The effects of blade aspect ratio and taper ratio are analyzed, which shows that the cycloidal rotors with the same chord length have quite similar performance even though the blade aspect ratio varies from a very small value to a large one. By comparing the cycloidal rotors with different taper ratios, it is found that the rotors with large blade taper ratio outperform those with small taper ratio. This is due to the fact that the blade with larger taper ratio has longer chord and hence better efficiency. The analysis results show that the unsteady aerodynamic effects due to blade pitching motion play a more important role in the efficiency than the blade platform shape. Therefore we should pay more attention to the blade airfoil and pitching motion than the blade platform shape. The main contributions of this paper include: the analysis of the effects of aspect ratio and taper ratio on the hover efficiency of cycloidal rotor based on both the experimental and numerical simulation results; the finding of the main influencing factors on the hover efficiency; the qualitative guidance on how to design the blade platform shape for cycloidal rotors.