How Dynamic Inflow Survives in the Competitive World of Rotor Aerodynamics - Mechanical, Aerospace & Structural Engineering

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Mechanical, Aerospace & Structural Engineering, Washington University in St. Louis

How Dynamic Inflow Survives in the Competitive World of Rotor Aerodynamics

By Professor David Peters
Professor
Washington University Department of Mechanical, Aerospace and Structural Engineering

Thu, Sep 11, 2008 2:30 PM

Location: Lopata Hall Room 101

Dynamic wake models have found a firm place in rotary-wing analysis since their inception in the 1950’s, proliferation in the 1970’s, and maturation in the 1990’s. They have maintained their usefulness, despite the appearance of new and more powerful tools––such as prescribed-wake models, free-wake models, and computational fluid dynamics (CFD)––due to five fundamental reasons; 1.)The various models and improvements have always come in response to important, yet unexplained experimental results; 2.) the response to those results was invariably based on sound physical intuition as to the nature of the discrepancies; 3.) the model improvements at each step were based in engineering physics rather than heuristic fit of data; 4.) the models included only enough physics to explain the phenomenon––and no more; and 5.) each model was hierarchical to earlier models so that no model was ever replaced––i.e., each new improvement included earlier models as special cases. Because of this, dynamic wake models have maintained a strength in the domains of real-time flight simulation, stability computations, and flight mechanics and control. This paper looks in detail at how these developments have transpired and how they relate to the importance of simplified tools, in general.

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