Assessment of reduced order fuselage and blade models for rotorcraft interactional aerodynamics

Abstract

This paper investigates mid-fidelity Cartesian-based CFD tools developed either by the U.S. Army and ONERA for rotorcraft aerodynamics in the framework of the US-France Project Agreement on Rotary Wing Aeromechanics and Human Factors Integration Research. The common test-case is the simulation of the interaction between the rotor and the fuselage of the D365N configuration in forward flight, for which high-fidelity CFD simulations have been conducted in 2009. US Army’s code Helios/ROAM models the fuselage with an immersed boundary method (IBM) and the rotor blades as an actuator line. ONERA’s code FAST also models the fuselage with an IBM representation and the blades using body-fitted overset grids. This work presents a comparison of fuselage loads, rotor loads, and wake between simulations and experiments.