Development of Virtual Blade Model for Modelling Helicopter Rotor Downwash in OpenFOAM

摘要

This report documents the development of a computational model to simulate the complex flow induced by helicopter rotors, using an open-source computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code, OpenFOAMTM. This computational code is now being used to perform large-scale multi-physics simulations of the flow field around helicopters including exhaust plumes and their airframe impingement. The rotor downwash model was validated against available experimental data on rotor-fuselage interactions published by the Georgia Institute of Technology. The OpenFOAM predicted result was also shown to compare favourably with ANSYS Fluent predictions.