Time-accurate simulation of helicopter rotor flows including aeroelastic effects

The following work presents recent developments in the simulation of helicopter rotor flows in the hover and forward flight regimes. The simulations are carried out by solving the full time-accurate compressible flow equations, both Euler and Navier-Stokes, on a moving multiblock mesh around a rotor configuration. Aeroelastic effects are introduced as an integral part of the simulation. The resulting program, ROTOR87, is implemented in parallel, using a domain decomposition approach and the MPI (Message Passing Interface) Standard for communication purposes. The results demonstrate that the combination of highly efficient algorithms and high performance parallel computing yields an accurate and efficient method for the computation of complex vortical flows of interest to the rotorcraft community.