Characterization of a Canonical Helicopter Hub Wake

TL;DR

This study characterizes the wake behind canonical helicopter hub models using flow measurements and spectral analysis, revealing dominant coherent structures and their phase sensitivities, which enhances understanding of rotor wake interactions.

Contribution

It provides a detailed wake analysis of simplified helicopter hub models, showing how phase affects certain wake structures and identifying key nonlinear interactions.

Findings

Dominant wake structures decay slowly and are phase-insensitive.

The 6-revolution structure is phase-sensitive and results from nonlinear interactions.

The far wake is dominated by rotor arm wakes and their interactions.

Abstract

The current study investigates the long-age wake behind rotating helicopter hub models composed of geometrically simple, canonical bluff body shapes. The models consisted of a 4-arm rotor mounted on a shaft above a 2-arm (scissor) rotor with all the rotor arms having a rectangular cross section. The relative phase between the 2- and 4-arm rotors was either $0\deg$ (in-phase) or $45\deg$ (out-of-phase). The rotors were oriented at zero angle-of-attack and rotated at 30 Hz. Their wakes were measured with particle-image-velocimetry within a water tunnel at a hub diameter based Reynolds number of $820,000$ and an advance ratio of $0.2$. Mean profiles, fluctuating profiles and spectral analysis using time-series analysis as well as dynamic mode decomposition were used to characterize the wake and identify coherent structures associated with specific frequency content. The canonical geometry produced coherent structures that were consistent with previous results using more complex geometries. It was shown that the dominant structures (2 and 4 times per hub revolution) decay slowly and were not sensitive to the relative phase between the rotors. Conversely, the next strongest structure (6 times per hub revolution) was sensitive to the relative phase with almost no coherence observed for the in-phase model. This is strong evidence that the 6 per revolution content is a nonlinear interaction between the 2 and 4 revolution structures. This study demonstrates that the far wake region is dominated by the main rotor arms wake, the scissor rotor wake and interactions between these two features.