Abstract:
A numerical study is conducted to utilize comprehensive rotorcraft analysis code to advanced rotor technologies such as Individual Blade Control for vehicle performance and sizing tasks common to preliminary design methods. A code wrapper was developed for Advanced Rotorcraft Technology Inc's RCAS code with NASA Glenn's open source OpenMDAO, a MDAO tool written in python scripting language. Two cases are presented to demonstrate the utility of the RCAS wrapper. The first case utilizes the RCAS wrapper to run multiple concurrent RCAS trim analyses on a UH-60A rotor for an array of advance ratios and blade loading conditions. The second case integrates the RCAS wrapper with a previously developed OpenMDAO wrapper for NDARC, a preliminary design tool, into a single analysis environment to calculate these same empirical power factors for a UH-60A rotor with an IBC system. The time savings demonstrated by the OpenMDAO analysis environment successfully allows comprehensive analysis to be used to generate on-the-fly analytical characterizations of an IBC system for use in a preliminary design code to assess it's performance impact. Suggestions for future work are made to further exercise the capabilities of this environment and to further integrate it into the preliminary design process.