Propagation of material and manufacturing uncertainties in composite helicopter rotor blades

Abstract

The effects of material and manufacturing uncertainties of a composite UH-60A helicopter rotor blade on the beam properties, the rotating natural frequencies, the aeroelastic response and vibratory loads in hover and in forward flight are studied. The multidisciplinary rotor blade design framework of this study consists of three main components (DYMORE, VABS and the structural preprocessor SONATACBM) that are wrapped into the OpenMDAO open-source computing platform for system analysis and multidisciplinary optimization. Two separate Monte-Carlo simulations are performed with 1000 samples each. Both material and manufacturing uncertainties propagate through all levels of the simulation, resulting in substantial impacts on natural frequencies, elastic blade tip response and the 4/rev vibratory hubforces.