Numerical simulation of Blade Vortex Interaction and Vortex Ring State aerodynamics using a fully time marching unsteady wake model

摘要

The unsteady wake model MINT based on the Mudry's theory [1] describes the rigorous unsteady evolution of a wake modelized by a potential discontinuity surface. It has been already used for the simulation of helicopter in maneuvering flight conditions [2]. New improvements are implemented, which are validated for a Blade Vortex Interaction test case, the baseline test case of the HART I [3] wind tunnel campaign. This test case was chosen due to the accuracy of the wake computation needed to simulate the physics of the Blade Vortex Interaction phenomenon. The results obtained show a very good stability of the method and good agreement with the experimental results. This confirms the relevance of the MINT wake model to simulate this kind of phenomena where the main difficulty is an accurate simulation of the rotor wake. This good correlation encouraged us to use this tool for the simulation of the Vortex Ring State, a physical phenomenon characterized by a strong interaction between the rotor and its wake. The results of the simulated test case show trends qualitatively close to the experimental results [4].