Download and Rotor Installed Performance In Hover and Low Advance Ratio Flight

This paper documents recent developments in ongoing work on the prediction of installed performance of rotors in hover and near-hover conditions featuring configurations with strong rotor/airframe interaction. The focus is on the application “mid-fidelity” analysis tools to representative problems in modeling coupled rotor/airframe aerodynamic systems. The work reported here extends prior activity on this topic by assessing the performance of a previously studied mid-fidelity CFD model in capturing both hover download and thrust recovery, as well as on extending the range and configurations used for validation to additional full-scale systems. The overall goal is to provide a more complete assessment and validation of tools that are currently supporting conceptual and preliminary design of novel rotorcraft configurations