High-resolution simulation for rotorcraft aerodynamics in hovering and vertical descending flight using a hybrid method

A high-resolution simulation tool for rotorcraft aerodynamics is developed by coupling CFD with a Vorticity Transport Model (VTM). An Eulerian-based CFD module is used to model the blade near body flowfield, and a Lagrangian-based VTM module is employed for vortex tracking in the far wake. The coupling procedure is implemented by transmitting vortex sources to the VTM module and feeding boundary conditions back to the CFD module. The presented CFD/VTM hybrid solver is firstly validated by hover cases of three different rotor configurations. Simulation results, including the blade surface pressure distribution, rotor downwash, and hover figure of merit, exhibit favorable correlations with available experimental data. Then, a rotor operated in vertical descending flight with a fixed collective pitch is investigated. It is shown that the CFD/VTM coupling method is suitable for rotor wake simulation. Wake instabilities (far wake breakdown in hover and toroidal wake pattern in the vortex ring state) are successfully demonstrated with a moderate computational cost.     

Numerical study on flow fields and aerodynamics of tilt rotor aircraft in conversion mode based on embedded grid and actuator model

A method combining rotor actuator disk model and embedded grid technique is presented in this paper, aimed at predicting the flow fields and aerodynamic characteristics of tilt rotor aircraft in conversion mode more efficiently and effectively. In this method, rotor's influence is considered in terms of the momentum it impacts to the fluid around it; transformation matrixes among different coordinate systems are deduced to extend actuator method's utility to conversion mode flow fields' calculation. Meanwhile, an embedded grid system is designed, in which grids generated around fuselage and actuator disk are regarded as background grid and minor grid respectively, and a new method is presented for ‘donor searching' and ‘hole cutting' during grid assembling. Based on the above methods, flow fields of tilt rotor aircraft in conversion mode are simulated, with threedimensional Navier–Stokes equations discretized by a second-order upwind finite-volume scheme and an implicit lower–upper symmetric Gauss–Seidel(LU-SGS) time-stepping scheme. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed CFD method is very effective in simulating the conversion mode flow fields of tilt rotor aircraft.