UH-60A Blackhawk Helicopter Aerodynamics

Overview

As a part of NASA's Fundamental Aeronautics Program, the Subsonic Rotary Wing (SRW) Project is developing the next generation of comprehensive rotorcraft analysis and design tools using high-fidelity models, such as FUN3D. FUN3D is a suite of unstructured-grid computational fluid dynamics (CFD) codes being developed for high-fidelity aerodynamic analysis and design of rotorcraft.

Project Details

The prediction of aerodynamic loads on rotorcraft presents a significant challenge for CFD. The combination of intricate flow physics, nonlinear structural dynamics, and the geometrical complexity of rotorcraft all must be taken into account. Under the SRW Project, significant progress has been made toward meeting this challenge.

FUN3D is used to compute the rotor airloads (aerodynamic forces and moments) on a UH-60A Blackhawk helicopter at high-speed and high-thrust conditions. The flow solver is coupled to a rotorcraft comprehensive code (CAMRAD II) in order to account for trim and aeroelastic deflections. Computed airloads are compared with flight data to validate the simulation method. FUN3D's unique adjoint-based technique for design optimization is currently being extended for use in rotorcraft aerodynamic design.

Results and Impact

Ensuring that rotorcraft analysis and design tools can be scaled to a large number of processors and a variety of hardware types will reduce the time and cost of designing next-generation rotorcraft. Additionally, the development and validation of more accurate analysis tools will increase the confidence in new design concepts.

Role of High-End Computing Resources

To enable high-fidelity simulation and design of unsteady flows around the complex, moving geometries of rotorcraft, FUN3D must take full advantage of massively parallel computing environments. Using NASA's powerful supercomputing resources, we can evaluate and demonstrate FUN3D performance on a very large number of processors.