21st Congress of International Council of the Aeronautical Sciences, Melbourne, Australia, 13-18 September, 1998
Paper ICAS-98-2.5.2

UNSTEADY PARALLEL AIRFOIL DESIGN FOR ROTARY WING APPLICATIONS

de Castro Santos L. C.
University of Sao Paulo, Brazil

Keywords: parallel airfoil design, rotary wing applications

The fast changes in aerospace industry require a more accurate and flexible design structure, taking into account limitations on resources. In the under developed countries several industries failed in completing projects not only due to the lack of resources, but mostly due to the bad management of the available resources. An important issue in helicopter preliminary design is the choice of the blade geometry. The experimental data available in the literature severely limits the choices of design, and wind tunnels are not an option in a short budget context. Therefore a methodology is presented, by coupling a Navier-Stokes' 2D code, taking into account compressible and viscous effects, to classical blade element and momentum theory in order to provide a more flexible preliminary design tool, while minimizing the computational requirements in terms of hardware (which is more realistic for under developed countries). A design test case is performed confirming the validity of the technique.

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