21st Congress of International Council of the Aeronautical Sciences, Melbourne, Australia, 13-18 September, 1998
Paper ICAS-98-2.5.1

SIMULATION OF FLUID-STRUCTURE INTERACTION AT THE HELICOPTER ROTOR

Hierholz K. -H., Wagner S.
University of Stuttgart, Germany

Keywords: simulation, fluid-structure interaction, helicopter rotor

An approach for the numerical simulation of the aeroelastic behaviour of a multiblade helicopter rotor in hover and forward flight is presented. To describe the compressible, unsteady and transonic flow in forward flight the 3-D Finite-Volume Euler CFD Code INROT with a chimera overlapping embedded grid technique is used. It is coupled with a structural dynamic model which provides blade movement and deformation. The solution of the coupled problem is found through a staggered procedure in which the two fields are integrated in time. After each time step, the positions and velocities of the structural domain and the surface pressure of the fluid domain are exchanged. An efficient 3-D dynamic grid algorithm as well as a geometric conservative formulation of the Euler Equations for dynamic grids have been implemented. First results of coupled calculations are shown for the 5-bladed Hughes 500 Rotor in hover and in 100 let forward flight.

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