FEATURES OF MODELING THE FLOW AROUND THE HELICOPTER MAIN ROTOR TAKING INTO ACCOUNT ARBITRARY BLADES MOTION

Abstract

The article considers the problem of the flow around the helicopter main rotor taking into account blades flapping in the plane of rotation and in the plane of thrust as well as the elastic blades deformation. The rotor rotation is modeled by the method of converting Navier-Stokes equations from a fixed coordinate system associated with the incoming flow into a rotating system associated with the rotor hub. For axial flow problems, this makes it possible to formulate the problem as stationary at a constant rotational speed of rotor. For a mode of skewed flow around the rotor in the terms of incident flow in this system it is necessary to solve the non-stationary problem. To solve the problem, the method of deformable grids is used, in which the equations are copied taking into account the grid nodes motion determined in accordance with the spatial blades motion, and SST turbulence model is used for closure. The results of the test calculations of the main rotor aerodynamic characteristics with and without blade flapping are presented in this paper. The coefficients of the main rotor thrust cT and the blades hinge moments mh are compared. The calculations were carried out in the CFD software ANSYS CFX (TsAGI License No. 501024). The flow around a four-bladed main rotor of a radius of 2.5 meters is modeled in the regime of skewed flow. The speed of the incoming flow came to 85 m/s under normal atmospheric conditions. The rotor was at an angle of attack of −10˚. To calculate the rotor motion without taking into account the flapping movements, we used the nonstationary system of Navier-Stokes equations with the closure with SST turbulence model. The calculation was being carried out until the change in the maximum value of the rotor thrust during one revolution became less than 1%. For modeling flapping blade movements, the control laws and equations describing the angle of blade flapping as a function from its azimuth angle obtained from the experiment were used. The procedure for reconstructing the grid according to a given law was conducted using standard grid deformation methods presented in the ANSYS CFX software. When solving the nonstationary Navier-Stokes equations, a dual time step was used. The obtained results show that accounting of the effect of flapping movements and cyclic control of the blades has an impact on the character of changing the main rotor thrust coefficient during one revolution and significantly changes the shape of the graph of the hinge moment coefficient of each blade.