Nomenclature

This paper describes a new method to compute rotor wakes. An incompressible flow solver, SAGE, with Vorticity Confinement (VC) is used for the rapid, accurate prediction of rotorcraft flow fields. A preliminary validation for SAGE has been done recently for computing rotor flows in hover and in forward flight. The computations of flow over an entire helicopter configuration, including main rotor and tail rotor, are performed in a uniform Cartesian grid. The rotor blades are represented by very efficient lifting lines using a simple momentum source representation together with VC. The airloads of the rotor blades can be prescribed or calculated from a more complex code with which SAGE is coupled, such as TURNS, or by a simple analytic model