Numerical simulation of aerodynamic interaction for a tilt rotor aircraft in helicopter mode

AbstractA rotor CFD solver is developed for simulating the aerodynamic interaction phenomenon among rotor, wing and fuselage of a tilt rotor aircraft in its helicopter mode. The unsteady Navier–Stokes equations are discretized in inertial frame and embedded grid system is adopted for describing the relative motion among blades and nacelle/wing/fuselage. A combination of multi-layer embedded grid and “extended hole fringe” technique is complemented in original grid system to tackle grid assembly difficulties arising from the narrow space among different aerodynamic components, and to improve the interpolation precision by decreasing the cell volume discrepancy among different grid blocks. An overall donor cell searching and automatic hole cutting technique is used for grid assembly, and the solution processes are speeded up by introduction of OpenMP parallel method. Based on this solver, flow fields and aerodynamics of a tilt rotor aircraft in hover are simulated with several rotor collective angles, and the corresponding states of an isolated rotor and rotor/wing/fuselage model are also computed to obtain reference solution. Aerodynamic interference influences among the rotor and wing/fuselage/nacelle are analyzed, and some meaningful conclusions are drawn