The effects of sweep angle and sweep location on the performance of helicopter blades

Abstract EN

The objective from this study is to carry out parametric analysis to know the effect of different helicopter blade configurations on the rotor performance under hover condition.

The configurations include different sweep angles at different span locations.

The study was implemented on test case which is, the Caradonna-Tung rotor blade.

The analyzed rotor performance parameters are the thrust, torque and figure of merit.

All the computations are performed by solving the Reynolds Average Navier-Stokes (RANS) equations with the Spalart-Allmaras turbulence model.

The results show that, the effect of different sweep angles and locations on the untapered and untwisted Caradonna-Tung (C-T) blade.

Moreover, the effect on torque was much more pronounced than the effect on thrust.

It is observed that the torque may decrease in around of 7 % for the C-T blade and increases FM in some cases.