Helicopter simulation is nowadays emerging as a primary tool for the analysis and design of these vehicles. The progress made in the last few years is remarkable and is shaped, at large, by progress in the employed numerical algorithms and the success of some collaborative project at the EU and the USA that combined experiments and simulation, and provided unique datasets for validation of simulation methods. Today, we can confidently simulate the flow around helicopters or helicopter components at trimmed flight conditions and provide data suitable for use in the design process. The use of parallel computing and novel hardware architectures has also reduced the turn-around time of these computations.
In this paper we look at the current stat-of-the-art in helicopter simulation and compare numerical results with wind tunnel data. In addition, we put forward some challenging problems for the future including the simulation of aircraft in manoeuvring flight, acoustics, and multi-physics simulations.Some example results from the presentation can be seen in the following figure where a complete helicopter configuration is computed and compared with wind tunnel test data. The simulation method captured all main features of the flow with good results even for the dynamic content of the flow as it evolves in time.
The same methods developed for helicopters can also be used for a wide variety of problems including the simulation of flows around turbo-prop aircraft, and wind turbines. Further details on these application areas are given at the full paper.
Figure 1: Indicative results for the flow around a complex helicopter body. Experiments correspond to the EU-Funded GOAHEAD experiments.