Aeroelastic Modeling of Blade Vibration and its Effect on the Trim and Optimal Performance of Helicopter Rotors using a Harmonic Balance Approach

This dissertation concerns the optimization of the aeroelastic performance of conventional

helicopter rotors, considering various design variables such cyclic and higher

harmonic controls. A nite element model is introduced to model the structural

eects of the blade, and a coupled induced velocity/projected force model is used

to couple this structural model to the aerodynamic model constructed in previous

works. The system is then optimized using two separate objective functions: minimum

power and minimum vibrational loading at the hub. The model is validated

against several theoretical and experimental models, and good agreement is demonstrated

in each case. Results of the rotor in forward

ight demonstrate for realistic

advance ratios the original lifting surface model is sucient for modeling normalized

induced power. Through use of the dynamics model the vibrational loading minimization

is shown to be extremely signicant, especially when using more higher

harmonic control. However, this decrease comes at an extreme cost to performance

in the form of the normalized induced power nearly doubling. More realistic scenarios

can be created using multi-objective optimization, where it is shown that vibrational

loading can be decreased around 60% for a 5% increase in power.