A Study on the Far-Field Boundary Condition of Tightly Coupoled CFD/FreeWake Method in Hover

In this study, helicopter rotor flow is simulated by using a tightly coupled CFD/FreeWake method to describe wake characteristics and to calculate the flow field and rotor aerodynamics. In this tightly coupled CFD/FreeWake method, freewake model provides the boundary condition required in the CFD calculation and CFD provides the pressure distribution on blade surface used in freewake generation. To show the advantage of this method, the pressure distributions on blade surface of a hovering 2-bladed rotor are compared with other numerical methods. This tightly coupled CFD/FreeWake method shows good accuracy in the predicted results and efficient computation time.