AERODYNAMIC DESIGN OPTIMIZATION OF HELICOPTER ROTOR BLADES IN HOVER PERFORMANCE USING ADVANCED CONFIGURATION GENERATION METHOD

摘要

This study proposed a process to get optimal helicopter rotor blade shape regarding aerodynamic performance discipline by using a new geometry representation algorithm CST which uses both the Class Function/Shape Function Transformation. By this approach, airfoil shape was considered as design variables. This optimization process was constructed by integrating several programs which were developed by Department of Aerospace Information Engineering of Konkuk University. The design variables include twist, taper ratio, point of taper initiation, blade root chord, coefficients of airfoil distribution function. Aerodynamic constraints consist of limits on power available in hover and forward flight. While, the trim condition must be attainable. This paper considers rotor blade configuration for hover flight condition only, so that power required in hover was chosen as objective function of optimization problem. Sensitive analysis of each design variable showed that airfoil shape has an important role in performance of rotor. The optimum rotor blade reduced hover power required 7.4% and increased figure of merit 6.5% are a good improvement for rotor blade design.