“Far-field” torque evaluation of a helicopter rotor in hover : Analysis on results of numerical simulations of fluid mechanics
In this thesis, a formulation for “far-field” torque extraction in the case of a hovering rotor is presented. This formulation is derived from an aircraft “far-field” drag extraction method, based on van der Vooren and Destarac’s works [?, ?, ?]. A tool was previously developed at Onera to give an aerodynamic comprehensive analysis of aircraft drag, based on physical and local analysis of the computed flow field surrounding the aircraft. It decomposes the total drag, also called mechanical drag, into its physical components. These physical components can be defined as : 1) wave drag, 2) viscous drag, 3) induced drag. The adaptation of the method to a rotor in hover leads to consider rotor torque instead of aircraft drag, which gives the following decomposition : 1) wave torque, 2) viscous torque, 3) induced torque. Rotor simulations differ from aircraft ones inasmuch as the Euler (or RANS) equations are not written in the same reference frame : aircraft simulations use the relative velocity formulation while rotor simulations use the absolute velocity projected in the relative frame. This difference leads to two different formulations of the flow equations, and necessarily two different formulations of the drag or torque extraction. This change of reference frame also implies some changes in the thermodynamical quantities used, in particular the use of the rothalpy instead of the stagnation enthalpy to determine the torque due to irreversible phenomena. An application of this method is described on a four-bladed rotor created for this study and shows how this method can improve rotor performance extraction from numerical simulations.