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Actuator disc modelling for helicopter rotors. (English) Zbl 1133.76355

Summary: The helicopter project CHANCE contains, among other developments, the quasi-steady approximation to modelling rotors with actuator discs. This reduces the cost of an unsteady simulation down to a stationary one. In testing existing approaches in the literature, the source term implementation proved to perform best, especially in forward flight: source terms located on the disc bottom side impart impulse and energy to the fluid. These are obtained from a loose coupling between two DLR codes: the flow solver FLOWer and the rotor code S4. The latter provides a rotor map, a radial and azimuthal force distribution, to the former converting it to the actuator disc map (source terms). Low velocities are accounted for using preconditioning. A more flexible Chimera approach can be used. The actuator disc feature has been developed in a parallel framework for shorter turn-around times.

MSC:

76U05 General theory of rotating fluids
76M12 Finite volume methods applied to problems in fluid mechanics

Software:

MEGAFLOW
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