| The trim and stability of an isolated hingeless rotor in forward flight are predicted for two coning angles with advance ratio, shaft angle and collective pitch variations. These predictions are correlated with measurements from a test model with four soft-inplane, soft-torsion blades. The test was conducted by the U.S. Army Aeroflightdynamics Directorate at Ames. The collective pitch and shaft angle are set prior to each test point, and the rotor is trimmed as follows: the longitudinal and lateral cyclic pitch controls are adjusted through a swashplate to minimize the 1/rev flapping moment at the 12% radial station. The database includes the cyclic pitch controls, steady root-flap moment and lag regressive-mode damping. The predictions are based on a modal approach with both nonrotating and rotating modes, the ONERA dynamic stall models of lift, drag and pitching moment, and a three-dimensional state-space wake model. The periodic shooting method, with damped Newton iteration and the fast-Floquet theory, is used to predict the cyclic pitch controls and the corresponding periodic responses; the equivalent Floquet transition matrix (EFTM) comes out as a byproduct. The eigenvalues and eigenvectors of the EFTM lead to the frequencies and damping levels. The steady root-flap moment is calculated by both the force integration and mode-deflection methods. Although exact, the fast-Floquet theory requires a finite-state representation of all states and is not applicable to numerically and experimentally generated data of response histories. Therefore, the stability is also predicted by three related approximations: generalized Floquet (fast-Floquet) theory and Sparse Time Domain (STD) technique. These approximations can be applied with a finite-state representation of an arbitrary number of states and to response histories; their convergence characteristics and accuracy are examined as well. Two major findings are: (1) The dynamic wake dramatically improves the correlation of the lateral cyclic pitch controls, and (2) all three approximations have excellent convergence characteristics and the converged values agree well with the exact values. |
