ISBN 9783843947909

978-3-8439-4790-9, Reihe Ingenieurwissenschaften

Johannes Letzgus
High-Fidelity Simulation of Dynamic Stall on Helicopter Rotors

167 Seiten, Dissertation Universität Stuttgart (2021), Hardcover, A5

Zusammenfassung / Abstract

High-fidelity CFD simulations of helicopter rotors are carried out to investigate the dynamic stall flow phenomenon. The simulations are based on two experimental test cases, namely a model rotor with high cyclic pitch control operated at DLR Göttingen, and a highly-loaded, high-speed turn flight of the Bluecopter demonstrator. URANS and DDES simulations are carried out using the flow solver FLOWer coupled with CAMRAD II.

A validation of the numerical methods is conducted based on the experimental model-rotor case, which shows that the onset of dynamic stall and the associated load overshoots agree well in overall. An unprecedented comparison of instantaneous PIV and CFD results reveals that after stall onset, only the DDES captures the chaotic nature of separated flow and exhibits small-scale vortical structures that correlate nicely with the measurement. However, the DDES suffers from the numerical artifact of modeled-stress depletion leading to grid-induced separation. Therefore, several improvements to the so-called boundary-layer shielding are investigated for both dynamic stall cases and found to eliminate the issue. Also, a shear-layer-adaptive filter width is successfully applied to the LES mode of the DDES that promotes a more realistic development of flow instabilities in separated shear layers.

Concerning the turn flight simulation of the Bluecopter, the computed main rotor control angles agree very well with the flight-test measurements. A comparison of the pitch-link loads shows a good correlation regarding the overall trends and a significant improvement over a lower-order analysis. However, the pitch-link-load amplitudes are still underpredicted. Furthermore, the flow field is found to be highly unsteady and complex throughout a large portion of the azimuth, exhibiting strong separation and multiple dynamic stall events that are partly triggered by blade-vortex interaction.