Search

Vibratory loads imposed by the rotating blade upon the fuselage has been one of major obstacles in rotorcrafts. A new concept of rotor blade is currently developed to adopt an Active Trailing-edge Flap (ATF) to alleviate such obstacles. The flap is mounted at 65~85% spanwise location from the rotor hub. The nominal rotational speed of the blade is as high as 1,528 RPM, to match the required tip Mach number. Structural integrity is one of the important design aspects to be maintained and monitored in this special type of rotor. This is due to that many detailed components, which drive the flap, are inserted inside the rotating blade. To conduct its structural design and analysis, CAMRAD-II and the one-dimensional beam analysis are used. At the same time, three-dimensional finite element analysis are also used, such as MSC. PATRAN/NASTRAN, in order to analyze the details of the present active blade. As a result, comparable characteristics for the present rotor are predicted by both approaches.

the present paper, a new version of DYMORE, which is an analysis to solve a nonlinear multi-body dynamics problem, is used to simulate an Individual Blade Control (IBC) algorithm in order to reduce vibration in helicopter rotors. The Active Twist Rotor (ATR), in which Active Fiber Composites (AFC) are embedded, is utilized for IBC. The main purpose of the present investigation is to compare the analytical results with experiments and previous version of DYMORE. The experiments are performed at NASA Langley Transonic Dynamics Tunnel. According to the present result, it is observed that the correlation regarding the vibratory loads is improved.