Active twist rotor blade modelling using particle-wake aerodynamics and geometrically exact beam structural dynamics

An active aeroelastic and aeroacoustic analysis of helicopter rotor systems is presented in this paper. It is a tightly coupled computational aeroelastic code that interfaces a particle-wake panel method code with an active nonlinear mixed variational intrinsic beam element code. In addition, a Ffowcs-Williams-Hawkings equation-based acoustic component is incorporated to complete the numerical implementation. The theory behind each component is summarized here as well as the method for coupling the aerodynamic and structural components. Sample acoustic and aeroelastic results are given for different model-scale rotors. Comparisons with available (passive) results show very good agreement. Preliminary study with an active twist rotor is also shown.