Numerical Investigation on Aerodynamic Performance of Twisted Blade for Human Powered Helicopter

It is a dream for the human to freely fly in the sky by his/her own power. A human powered airplane has been developed and now we can fly for more than 100 km, while nobody has arrived at the height more than 1 m by a human powered helicopter. Therefore, the realization of a human powered helicopter will be a next dream of the human. The weight reduction is one of the most critical problems to realize a human powered helicopter. However, blades made of light materials are twisted and bent during hover. In this work, we perform three-dimensional simulation considering with fluid-structure interaction to obtain the design guidelines. The simulation is based on a weakly coupling followed as: (1) calculate the flow field, (2) calculate the deformation of blade, (3) remesh and return to phase (1). To investigate the blade performance, some cases of initial attack angle from 2 deg. to 20 deg. every 2 deg. are conducted. The results show that the optimum initial attack angle is 8 deg. and then total lift obtained by the blade is 1.36 kN. This would be sufficient for realizing a human powered helicopter.Copyright © 2010 by ASME