Explicit Kutta Condition Correction for Rotary Wing Flows A. D'alascio, A
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Transactions on Modelling and Simulation vol 18, © 1997 WIT Press, www.witpress.com, ISSN 1743-355X Explicit Kutta Condition Correction for Rotary Wing Flows A. D'Alascio, A. Visingardi, and P. Renzoni CIRA, Centra Italiano Ricerche Aerospaziali EMail: [email protected], [email protected], p.renzoni@cira. it Abstract An explicit correction to the Kutta condition applied to rotary wing potential flows is described. Indeed, the simple application of the classical steady Kutta condition, which ensures the uniqueness of the solution of the potential flow problems [1,2], is unable to guarantee a zero pressure jump at the blade trailing edge. Several investigations performed on this problem have indicated the presence of considerable non-zero pressure jumps for highly 3D flows (blade root and tip) [3] and for unsteady flows characterized by high reduced frequencies [4]. The application of a Kutta condition correction in CIRA's BEM code RAMSYS [3] has shown the ability to ensure a continuous pressure across the blade trailing edge. 1 Introduction The flow field around helicopter rotors is unsteady and highly three-dimensio- nal. A low frequency unsteadiness is induced in the flow by the relative motion between rotating and non-rotating components of the helicopter. The interaction between each main rotor blade with the wake of preceding blades is responsible for mid frequency unsteadiness whereas high frequency unsteadiness is generated by blade/tip vortex encounters. The rotor blades during their motion are subject to cross flows which make the flow field three-dimensional, expecially in the vicinity of the ro- Transactions on Modelling and Simulation vol 18, © 1997 WIT Press, www.witpress.com, ISSN 1743-355X 780 Boundary Elements tor blade root and tip. In addition, considering the role of the fuselage, its displacement effect distorts the onset flow further increasing the three- dimensionality of the flow field in the rotor disk. The rotor wake is deformed due to the presence of the fuselage which in turn alters the interaction pro- cess between rotor blades and their wake. In the numerical simulation of such complex flow fields the simple ap- plication of the classical steady Kutta condition has turned out to be unable to guarantee a zero pressure jump at the blade trailing edge. This pressure jump has shown to influence the whole pressure distribution on the blade, thus considerably altering the prediction of the aerodynamic loads. An explicit unsteady Kutta correction has been introduced in the CIRA computer code RAMSYS [3], based on Morino's boundary integral formulation, for the unsteady, incompressible aerodynamics of multi-body configurations in arbitrary rigid motion. The aim of this paper is to il- lustrate an algorithm of an unsteady Kutta correction by providing the necessary details about the structure of the algorithm itself, and to present some results relative to the application of this correction to the aerodynamic analysis of an oscillating airfoil and a helicopter rotor. 2 BEM formulation The formulation consists in the solution of Laplace's equation written in terms of the velocity potential <f> V^ = 0 Vx^^(f) (1) such that v = V<£. S(t) is a surface outside of which the flow is potential and consists of a surface SB surrounding the body geometry and a surface Sw surrounding the wake geometry. The boundary condition at infinity is that <j> — 0. The surface of the body is assumed to be impermeable hence |^ = v# • n where MB is the ve- locity of a point on the body. The wake is a surface of discontinuity which is not penetrated by the fluid and across which there is no pressure jump. The second wake condition implies that A0 remains constant following a wake point x*y, and equal to the value it had when XVK left the trailing edge. The value of A</> at the trailing edge is obtained by using the Kutta- Joukowski hypothesis that no vortex filament exists at the trailing edge; this implies that, at the trailing edge, the value of A</> on the wake and the value of A</> on the body are equal. Transactions on Modelling and Simulation vol 18, © 1997 WIT Press, www.witpress.com, ISSN 1743-355X Boundary Elements 781 The application of Green's function method to Eq.(l), yields the fol- lowing boundary-integral-representation for the velocity potential cf> E(x*)<Xx*,L) = /B + /w (2) with and representing respectively the contribution of the body and the wake. E(x*) is a domain function defined as zero inside S and unity elsewhere. The helicopter geometry and the wake are respectively discretised by M and N hyperboloidal quadrilateral panels on which the unknown velocity potential, the normal wash and the velocity potential jump are constant (zeroth-order formulation). Using the collocation method and setting the collocation points at the centroids of each element on the body geometry, the integral equation, Eq.(2), is replaced by an algebraic linear system of equations for the velocity potential </>: M M N Ek<t>k(t) = £ BfenVm(t) + £ Ckm4>m(t] + ]T F^A^(<) (3) 771=1 m = l n=l where 0, C, and F are respectively the body source, body doublet, and wake doublet influence coefficients. The system of linear Eqs.(3) can be written in matrix form as: A • </> = B - <0 + F - A0 (4) being Akm = EkSkm — Ckm with 8km representing the Kronecker function. A Conjugate Gradient Method (GMRES solver) is applied for the nu- merical solution of the problem. Once obtained the velocity potential <^(Z), the pressure coefficient Cpk(t) is computed, for each body panel k G [1,M], by applying the un- steady Bernoulli equation: = _-- + V* • V^ + v& • Vfa (5) *>e/ \ Ut * ) where V^e/ is the reference velocity and V& is the entrainment velocity of the panel k. Transactions on Modelling and Simulation vol 18, © 1997 WIT Press, www.witpress.com, ISSN 1743-355X 782 Boundary Elements 3 The unsteady Kutta condition problem The Kutta-Joukowski hypothesis that no vortex filament exists at the trail- ing edge is no longer sufficient for unsteady and/or highly three-dimensional fluid flows. Indeed the numerical validation of the RAMSYS code has shown that pressure jumps might occur at the blade trailing edge expecially for cases of helicopter rotors in forward flight and for highly unsteady flows on oscillating wings. Taking the idea of Kinnas and Hsin [5] an iterative procedure has been developed with which for each trailing-edge wake panel the pressure jump, computed by applying Bernoulli's equation for unsteady flows Eq.(6), has been explicitly set equal to zero, in order to impose a continuous pressure across the trailing edge. By denoting with A^_/ the difference between the values computed on the upper and lower body panels at the T.E. it is obtained: r^ 1 i = 0 (6) Indicating by NTE the number of trailing edge wake panels, NTE lin- earised equations are coupled, through the velocity potentials at the blade trailing edges, to the M Eqs.(3) of the algebraic system. A linearised ex- pression of the Eq. (6) is: . • V(<J . «_ at \ /t«, [ ot 2 (7) where 6 A<^ — A<$^~ — A<^, being A<^ = <&^— <&„ and j the preceding- iteration index; 2%, £ [1, A^^] is the wake T.E. panel index, and i^u and IM its neighbouring body panels on the T.E. upper and lower sides, Fig. 1. Figure 1: Discretisation stencil The time derivatives are evaluated with second-order accuracy. The right hand side of Eq.(7) is discretised, consistently with the expression of the pressure coefficient of Eq.(5), using a spline function chordwise and a Transactions on Modelling and Simulation vol 18, © 1997 WIT Press, www.witpress.com, ISSN 1743-355X Boundary Elements 783 central second-order discretisation function spanwise. The left hand side can be discretised using several schemes without changing the result of the iterative procedure, being the Bernoulli's equation written in terms of vari- ations of the velocity potential jump at the T.E.. Therefore the stencil influences the rate of convergence of the algorithm. In the RAMSYS code the term (V-f V<^'),^ is computed as the average of correspondent values on the upper and lower T.E. body panels, Fig. 1. A good rate of convergence has been obtained by imposing: (v + v^ = \ (v,,_ + v<. + v,,, + v<) where both V<^ and V</>^ are computed using the three neighbouring velocity potentials respectively in the panel centroids i^ and z&/, as shown in Fig. 1. Eq.(7) in the discretised form is written as: being cj = c^ w representing the over-relaxation factor set equal to 1.5. In matrix form: T' - 6 A^ = q^ (8) By coupling Eqs.(4) and (8), a new set of equations is obtained which is solved for a certain number of iterations. Convergence is reached when the maximum value of the trailing edge pressure coefficient jump is of the order of 10~^. In the RAMSYS code a number of iterations not greater than 5 are necessary to reach convergence. 4 Numerical validation The test cases performed are relative to an oscillating NACA 0012 airfoil and an isolated rotor in forward flight. In the first test case the pressure jump at the T.E. of the airfoil is due to the unsteadiness of the motion, while in the second case it is essentially due to the three-dimensional flow generated on the rotor blades. A comparison of the pressure coefficient distributions and the lift forces acting on both the airfoil and the rotor are computed by RAMSYS with and without the Kutta condition correction. 4.1 Oscillating airfoil This test case deals with a NACA 0012 airfoil, discretised by 60 panels, os- cillating about its quarter chord point at a reduced frequency k = ^j = 0.2 Transactions on Modelling and Simulation vol 18, © 1997 WIT Press, www.witpress.com, ISSN 1743-355X 784 Boundary Elements and with a pitching amplitude c*o = 10°.