Advanced coupled aeroelastic analysis of helicopter rotor system

Abstract

Comparing to other flight vehicles, aerodynamics of helicopter blades is time-periodic. For blade flutter analysis this feature requires development of special tools, taking the flow time-dependency into account. In this study, we develop a framework for the flutter analysis of the full blade model based on Floquet theory. A finite-element beam model governs the blade, whereas the flow is governed by quasi-static aerodynamic functions. An in-house software is developed to integrate the aerodynamics into Nastran finite-element model for solving both static and dynamic aeroelastic problems