The AVINOR Aeroelastic Simulation Code and Its Application to Reduced Vibration Composite Rotor Blade Design

Abstract

The Active Vibration and Noise Reduction (AVINOR) aeroelastic simulation code for helicopter rotor blades is described. AVINOR is a research code that has been developed at UCLA and the University of Michigan for the purpose of conducting computationally ecient aeroelastic response analyses while maintaining a level of fidelity so as to be suitable for preliminary design of helicopter rotor blades. The current capabilities of AVINOR are illustrated by considering aeroelastic tailoring of a composite rotor blade for minimum vibration over the entire flight envelope. The AVINOR composite blade model is based on geometrically nonlinear kinematics suitable for moderate deflection analysis and the University of Michigan/Variational Asymptotic Beam Sectional (UM/VABS) analysis is used for cross-sectional modeling. A surrogate-based optimization (SBO) approach is utilized to locate a blade design which exhibits the best trade-o between reducing vibration due to blade-vortex interaction (BVI) at low advance ratios, and alleviating vibration due to dynamic stall which occurs at high advance ratios.