Airloads Correlation of the UH-60A Rotor Inside the 40- by 80-Foot Wind Tunnel

The presented research validates the capability of a loosely coupled computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and comprehensive rotorcraft analysis (CRA) code to calculate the flowfield around a rotor and test stand mounted inside a wind tunnel. The CFD/CRA predictions for the Full-Scale UH-60A Airloads Rotor inside the National Full-Scale Aerodynamics Complex (NFAC) 40- by 80-Foot Wind Tunnel at NASA Ames Research Center are compared with the latest measured airloads and performance data. The studied conditions include a speed sweep at constant lift up to an advance ratio of 0.4 and a thrust sweep at constant speed up to and including stall. For the speed sweep, wind tunnel modeling becomes important at advance ratios greater than 0.37 and test stand modeling becomes increasingly important as the advance ratio increases. For the thrust sweep, both the wind tunnel and test stand modeling become important as the rotor approaches stall. Despite the beneficial effects of modeling the wind tunnel and test stand, the new models do not completely resolve the current airload discrepancies between prediction and experiment.

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