Variable Fidelity Interference Module for Rotorcraft Design, Development and Support

Accurate full vehicle performance prediction is essential for designing rotorcraft and supporting flight operations. The computational cost of contemporary CFD methods is hampered by excessive numerical dissipation of vorticity, and common methods fail to predict adequately the unsteady rotor and fuselage loading when engineering/design level grids are employed. Continuum Dynamics, Inc. (CDI), Georgia Institute of Technology (GT), and Sikorsky Aircraft Corporation, propose to directly address these limitations while simultaneously supporting ongoing and future Army rotorcraft development and support efforts by developing a suite of variable-fidelity wake prediction methods for improving CFD and enabling breakthrough full rotorcraft interactional aerodynamics modeling capabilities. The proposed approach builds upon work at CDI and GT in CFD, free-wake and hybrid analyses to dramatically reduce the computational cost of complete rotorcraft CFD by developing a robust and efficient overset coupling between DoD CFD/CSD methods and variants of CDIs CHARM and VorTran-M2 solvers that is transparent to the end user. Phase I will see the proof-of-concept development and validation of such an approach, including capabilities assessment and demonstration in a real-world design environment.