Development Of An Integrated Platform For Helicopter Rotor Design And Blade Structure Optimization

Rotor is the key part of a helicopter. It is made up of hub, washplate and blade. Helicopter rotor structure design needs to across multiple subjects and software to accomplish, however, most of the existing rotor software systems are independent of each other, and their operating system and data format is also different from each other, so the information transfer between them is difficult, which greatly affects the efficiency of the rotor structure design. In addition, it is difficult to carry out the optimization design of the helicopter blade structure design, and the degree of blade’s 3D automatic modeling is low.In view of the above problems, the design method of the rotor structure and the integrated design technology is researched in this paper, and the integrated design platform software for the helicopter rotor structure which called RDIS is developed on this basis, the software integrates the hub and washplate design subsystem, blade structure design subsystem and frequency modulation Optimization design subsystem; at the same time, this paper studies the optimization for the blade structure and the 3D automatic modeling method for the blade components, and the research results have been integrated into the RDIS. The main contributions are as follows:1. Based on database access, secondary development of CATIA and parametric graphic display technology, this paper presents an integrated design platform software for the helicopter rotor structure which called RDIS independently, the software integrates the hub and washplate design, blade structure design and frequency modulation optimization design subsystem, and implements the information transmission between the software subsystem, the RDIS software and the external software, the platform software has been delivered to use.2. Based on the parametric definition for blade and the structure characteristic calculation, the optimization for blade structure design is researched in this paper, we analyze the design variables, optimization constraints, optimization objectives and optimization methods, and establish the sectional and the global optimization model of blade by using the iSight software., the structure optimization of a model blade is realized in the end, the optimization effect of the model blade is: the moment of inertia is increased by 1.20%, and the quality is reduced by 3.29%.3. Automatic geometric modeling of blade components is the extension and the final result of the blade structure optimization design. Based on the parametric definition for blade components, this paper studies the automatic modeling method for the blade components such as filler and so on, and the corresponding automatic modeling program is developed, which can realize the automatic geometric modeling of the filler of model blade’s airfoil and tip, the validity of the proposed automatic modeling method is verified.