Passive suppression of helicopter ground resonance using nonlinear energy sinks attached on the helicopter blades

Abstract

This paper investigates the passive control of a rotor instability named helicopter Ground Resonance (GR). The passive device consists of a set of essential cubic nonlinear absorbers named Nonlinear Energy Sinks (NES) each of them positioned on a blade. A dynamic model reproducing helicopter GR instability is presented and transformed to a time-invariant nonlinear system using a multi-blade coordinate transformation based on Fourier transform mapping the dynamic state variables into a non-rotating reference frame. Combining complexification, slow/fast partition of the dynamics and averaging procedure, a reduced model is obtained which allowed us to use the so-called geometric singular perturbation analysis to characterize the steady state response regimes. As in the case of a NES attached to the fuselage, it is shown that under suitable conditions, GR instability can be completely suppressed, partially suppressed through periodic response or strongly modulated response. Relevant analytical results are compared, for validation purposes, to direct integration of the reference and reduced models.