High fidelity CFD simulation of helicopter rotor in forward flight

Hybrid RANS-LES simulation using chimera method performed on the 7A helicopter rotor in high speed forward flight (mu = 0.4, Mtip = 0.6462).

Each blade mesh contains 5 million points and the background grid contains 4.1 billion points. 1536 CPU cores were used to run this simulation. A revolution is achieved in 24h. The video shows a Q criteria iso surface of value 5000 colored with vorticity magnitude.

Post-processing and flow images have been made with Cassiopée ( https://cassiopee.onera.fr ).

The Fast solver ( https://fast.onera.fr ) is used to run the RANS-LES simulation with AUSM scheme on Cartesian grids and Roe scheme on blade grids.

Simulation and video realized by Baptiste Méral.

00:00 Flight conditions
00:10 Flow from front view
00:20 Top view
00:35 Side view
00:45 Back view
00:56 On-board tip camera [!]