General flow field analysis methods for helicopter rotor aeroacoustics

Previous work in the analysis of rotor flow fields for aeroacoustic applications involved the preliminary development of an efficient and accurate Lagrangian simulation of the unsteady vorticity field in the vicinity of helicopter main rotor that could analyze a limited class of rotor/wake interactions. The capabilities of this analysis have subsequently been considerably enhanced to allow it to serve as the foundation for a general analysis of the rotor/wake interaction noise. This paper presents the details of these enhancements, which focus on the expansion of the reconstruction approach developed previously to handle arbitrary vortex wake interactions within three-dimensional regions located near or within the rotor disk. Also, the development of nearfield velocity corrections appropriate for the analysis of such interactions is described, as is a preliminary study of methods for using the new high-resolution flow field analysis for noise predictions. The results show that by employing this novel flow field reconstruction technique it is possible to employ full-span free wake analyses with temporal and spatial resolution suitable for acoustic applications while reducing the computation time required by one to two orders of magnitude relative to traditional methods.