A rotor section aerodynamic design package using the direct iterative surface curvature method Original Research Article

A rotor section aerodynamic design package is developed by coupling the constrained direct iterative surface curvature (CDISC) design method with the FPX rotor code. The coupling between the CDISC design and the FPX flow analysis is fully automated. The CDISC design method employs a predictor–corrector procedure iteratively to determine a surface geometry which produces a target pressure distribution, where the target pressure distribution is either pre-defined or automatically generated through flow and geometry constraints. The FPX code is an extended full-potential rotor computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code, which solves the three-dimensional unsteady full-potential equation in a strong conservative form using an implicit approximate-factorization finite-difference scheme with entropy and viscosity corrections. Application of the CDISC design method coupled with the FPX rotor code is done for rotor blades in hovering motion. A few design examples are presented to demonstrate the capability and efficiency of the new package in rotor section design.