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:
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[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.