Turbulence modeling and simulation and related effects on helicopter response with wake dynamics using finite elements and parallelism.

Future helicopters will require all-weather capability for stabilized flight through severe atmospheric turbulence. This requirement has brought into focus the effect of turbulence on handling qualities. Accordingly, there is renewed interest in modeling and simulating turbulence and predicting turbulence-induced rotor oscillations. This thesis addresses three fundamental aspects of the problem: (1) modeling and simulation of turbulence including cross-correlation; (2) three-dimensional dynamic-wake effects on rotor response to turbulence and (3) prediction of turbulence and response statistics. The analysis is based on the theory of isotropic and homogeneous turbulence and Taylor's frozen-field approximation. Quasisteady airfoil aerodynamics and a three-dimensional wake are used. Both the isolated blades and isolated rotors are treated. The parallelization is carried out on a massively parallel MasPar SIMD computer. Major conclusions include: (i) The effects of cross-correlation are negligible when two stations lie on the same blade and appreciable when two stations lie on different blades. (ii) In modeling the three-dimensional wake, 3 harmonics are required and dynamic wake has dominant influence on response statistics. (iii) With increasing comprehensiveness of helicopter-turbulence modeling, the sequential execution times increase dramatically; by comparison, the parallel execution times are far lower and, more significantly, remain nearly constant.