Multidisciplinary Analysis Framework for Rotorcraft Research and Development

A multidisciplinary analysis toolchain specifically for rotorcraft has been developed at JAXA. HeliDesign provides the sizing of a conventional or a compound helicopter to meet the specified mission requirement based on preliminary semi-empirical relations. rFlight delivers the trim analysis and performance of a rotorcraft together with the linearized flight dynamics models based on analytical formulations of the rotor aerodynamics from blade-element theory. rBET/RMT is a low fidelity tool based on blade-element theory. For high-fidelity aeroelastic analysis of a rotating blade, rFlow3D is constructed based on high-resolution CFD and loosely coupled with computational structural dynamics(CSD) to obtain the elastic deformations of a rotor blade, while the natural frequencies and modes are obtained using rMode. rGrid tools support the automatic grid generations around a rotor blade to be computed in rFlow3D. Acoustic signature from a rotorcraft can be predicted using rNoise based on the FW-H equations using the output from rFlow3D. These tools have been applied for new rotorcraft developments and the high-fidelity toolchain has been validated with reliable test data with satisfactory accuracy.