In helicopter performance design and optimization, aerodynamics is the primary area. Therefore to achieve the required helicopter performance to accomplish the missions, the efficient design process in preliminary design phase is crucial. In a past, the preliminary design involved the simplified equations to account for the aerodynamic behavior of a rotorcraft, resulting in the loss of aerodynamic phenomena such as turbulence and vortex flow pattern, which contribute to the nonlinear behaviors.
In order to improve overall design process, we thus propose the preliminary design process without the iteration. The proposed preliminary design applied the recent blade design theories with CFD procedure integrated in the preliminary design. The main benefit of this new methodology is to access the detailed flow physics as quick as possible, thus allowing the designer to faster analyze and improve the performance of the helicopter in early stage of design process.
Based on the design results given by the proposed preliminary design methodology, the new blade design was configurationally changed. The redesigned blade was twisted configuration with ∼9 and ∼27 degrees at the cone at the tip and cone, respectively. The computational results showed that the twisted blade increased the lift by approximately 846% relative to the fist design. In addition, the design cycle can be completed in only one cycle and the design time spent is few days.