Aerodynamic Analysis Of Isolated 3 Bladed Helicopter With Supercritical Airfoil

Abstract

Helicopters is a type of rotorcraft which is currently used for many purposes. Design of Helicopter differs with various parameters for different applications. Helicopters are different than aircrafts as it has a special ability of Vertical take off and Landing, No special runway etc. It has some disadvantage than aircrafts as in case of Speed and pilot operation. Helicopter Speed is improved from the invention of helicopter to recent days. Many factors are suppressing the speed of helicopters. In this research it deals with increase of speed of helicopter by aerodynamics characteristics. Improving Airfoil characteristics improve the performance of helicopter. This research concentrates combining of characteristics of supercritical airfoil in helicopter blades. Supercritical airfoils play important role in increasing performance of aircraft in transonic regions to delay critical mach number and drag divergence mach number. Helicopters generally travel at lesser speed due to design constraints. By employing supercritical airfoil in helicopter we can have an advantage of supercritical airfoil as shock free or disturbance free high-speed flow. In this research numerical simulation of three bladed helicopter for three airfoils as NACA0012, HH02 and SC(2)-0714 airfoils has been analysed. Blades are analysed using non rotational basis as a preliminary research. Models are designed using CATIA V5 and imported to ANSYS WORKBENCH. Mesh has been done using ANSYS WORKBENCH and models are analysed using ANSYS FLUENT. Analysis Carried out for various angle of attack varies from -50 to 100 and results are compared for all three blades. Analysis was carried out for Mach number 0.42. In static three-dimensional analysis it has given a promising increase in the aerodynamic performance for supercritical airfoil. HH02 airfoils are currently used in APACHE helicopter which is used as fighter helicopter. As it is static analysis the validation of results was done using the reference [1]. In future Multiple Reference Frame (MRF) as rotational frame will give a much accurate result.