EULER CALCULATIONS OF MULTIBLADED ROTORS IN HOVER BY DLR AND ONERA METHODS AND COMPARISON WITH HELISHAPE TESTS

Whithin the European project HELISHAPE, the Euler methods for the calculation of multibladed rotors in hover flight, developed respectively by DLR and ONERA, have been compared and assessed. No prescribed wake model is used by both methods. In this work, the computations were performed on common single-block structured grids for two realistic four-bladed rotors of aspect ratio equal to 15. The numerical results - obtained before the experimental data were available - compare fairly with the experiment and special attention is paid to the capture of the wake and the evolution of the tip vortex.