Coupled CFD/CSD Analysis of a Hovering Rotor Using High Fidelity Unsteady Aerodynamics and a Geometrically Exact Rotor Blade Analysis

Abstract

This paper presents a combination of a computational structural dynamics (CSD) and high fidelity unsteady computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis. Regarding a helicopter in hover, aerodynamic loads are computed from the three-dimensional Navier-Stokes solver in overlapped grids, and blade motions are obtained from the geometrically exact rotor beam analysis. To couple those analyses, a loose coupling method is adopted and the results are validated regarding a civil transport helicopter.