Analysis of helicopter blade-vortex interaction noise with application to adaptive-passive and active alleviation methods

This study focuses on detection and analysis methods of helicopter blade-vortex interactions (BVI) and applies these methods to two different BVI noise alleviation schemes—an adaptive-passive and an active scheme. A standard free-wake analysis based on relaxation methods is extended in this study to compute high-resolution blade loading, to account for blade-to-blade dissimilarities, and dual vortices when there is negative loading at the blade tips. The free-wake geometry is still calculated on a coarse azimuthal grid and then interpolated to a high-resolution grid to calculate the BVI induced impulsive loading. Blade-to-blade dissimilarities are accounted by allowing the different blades to release their own vortices. A number of BVI detection criteria, including the spherical method (a geometric criterion developed in this thesis) are critically examined. It was determined that high-resolution azimuthal discretization is required in virtually all detection methods except the spherical method which detected the occurrence of parallel BVI even while using a low-resolution azimuthal mesh. Detection methods based on inflow and blade loads were, in addition, found to be sensitive to vortex core size. While most BVI studies use the high-resolution airloads to compute BVI noise, the total noise can often be due to multiple dominant interactions on the advancing and retreating sides. A methodology is developed to evaluate the contribution of an individual interaction to the total BVI noise, based on using the loading due to an individual vortex as an input to the acoustic code WOPWOP. The adaptive-passive BVI alleviation method considered in this study comprises of reducing the length of one set of opposite blades (of a 4-bladed rotor) in low-speed descent. Results showed that differential coning resulting from the blade dissimilarity increases the blade-vortex miss-distances and reduces the BVI noise by 4 dB. The Higher Harmonic Control Aeroacoustic Rotor Test (HART) has been studied as an active method for BVI noise alleviation. Good validation of a baseline case without Higher Harmonic Control (HHC) is obtained. However the present analysis is unable to capture all the features of two specific HHC pitch input schedules examined. Some partial insight on the mechanisms at work is provided.