Towards accurate unsteady real-time helicopter aeroacoustic analysis using GPU-CUDA accelerated tools

Abstract

With the constant pursuit for more fuel efficient and less noisy helicopters, there is a requirement for numerical tools capable of faster aerodynamic and acoustic analysis. This work describes the development of a new aeroacoustic framework that takes advantage of the CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) framework, speeding up calculations by more than 2 orders of magnitude when compared with single thread CPU versions. The implemented framework is shown in detail and two different studies are presented to highlight the different capabilities. The first case study involves an unsteady analysis of an isolated MR (Main Rotor) where the speed and accuracy requirements are balanced, but mainly focused on maximizing the calculation speed. For the second case study a fully unsteady analysis of a coupled MR and TR (Tail Rotor) is performed to show the capability of the framework to carry out complex analysis in relatively short computational times.