Progress Towards Fuselage Drag Reduction via Active Flow Control: A Combined CFD and Experimental Effort

A combined computational and experimental effort has been undertaken to study fuselage drag reduction on a generic, non-proprietary rotorcraft fuselage by the appli-cation of active flow control. Fuselage drag reduction is an area of research interest to both the United States and France and this area is being worked collaboratively as a task under the United States/France Memorandum of Agreement on Helicopter Aeromechanics. In the first half of this task, emphasis is placed on the US generic fuse-lage, the ROBIN-mod7, with the experimental work be-ing conducted on the US side and complementary US and French CFD analysis of the baseline and controlled cases. Fuselage simulations were made using Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes flow solvers and with multiple turbulenc