Estimation of blade airloads from rotor blade bending moments

This paper presents a method for the estimation of blade airloads, based on the measurements of flap bending moments. In this procedure, the blade rotation in vacuum modes is calculated, and the airloads are expressed as an algebraic sum of the mode shapes, modal amplitudes, mass distribution, and frequency properties. The method was validated by comparing the calculated airload distribution with the original wind tunnel measurements which were made using ten modes and twenty measurement stations. Good agreement between the predicted and the measured airloads was found up to 0.90 R, but the agreement degraded towards the blade tip. The method is shown to be quite robust to the type of experimental problems that could be expected to occur in the testing of full-scale and model-scale rotors.