Optimization of rotor blade

JAXA Supercomputer System Annual Report April 2019-March 2020

Report Number: R19ECMP11

Subject Category: Competitive Funding

Responsible Representative: Yasutada Tanabe, Senior Researcher, Aviation Systems Research Unit, Aeronautical Technology Directorate
Contact Information: Yasutada Tanabe(tan@chofu.jaxa.jp)
Members: Yasutada Tanabe, Masahiko Sugiura, Hideaki Sugawara, Kuniyuki Takekawa

Abstract

Search the optimized rotor blade for high-speed rotorcraft.

Reference URL

Please refer to ‘Future type rotary-airfoil airplane system technology | Sky Frontier – Sky Frontier Program | Aeronautical Technology Directorate‘.

Reasons and benefits of using JAXA Supercomputer System

High-fidelity CFD is utlilized to obtain the aerodynamic performances of the rotors in hovering and in high-speed flight for rotor blade optimization. A lot of design samples must be evaluated so that the JSS2 supercomputer is a must requirement.

Achievements of the Year

Optimization of a helicopter rotor blade are conducted regarding twist angle and chord length. As a result, an optimal blade shape shows approximately twice L/DE (Lift by Effective Drag) of the conventional blade shape (Baseline) at high-speed flight, while maintaining approximately the same figure of merit of the baseline during hovering flight (Fig. 1). CFD result examples are shown in Figs. 2 and 3.

Fig.1: Analyses based on simple Blade-Element-Theory and CFD for the evaluation of optimized rotors

Fig.2: Rotor wake in hovering flight

Fig.3: Rotor wake in high advance ratio (0.7) forward flight

Publications

N/A

Usage of JSS2

Computational Information

Process Parallelization Methods: N/A
Thread Parallelization Methods: OpenMP
Number of Processes: 1
Elapsed Time per Case: 430 Hour(s)

Resources Used

Fraction of Usage in Total Resources*1(%): 0.63

Details

Please refer to System Configuration of JSS2 for the system configuration and major specifications of JSS2.

Computational Resources
System Name	Amount of Core Time (core x hours)	Fraction of Usage*2(%)
SORA-MA	2,770,946.66	0.34
SORA-PP	689,724.48	4.47
SORA-LM	433.17	0.18
SORA-TPP	116,515.98	7.03

File System Resources
File System Name	Storage Assigned (GiB)	Fraction of Usage*2(%)
/home	4,562.61	3.80
/data	6,806.35	0.12
/ltmp	858.19	0.07

Archiver Resources
Archiver Name	Storage Used (TiB)	Fraction of Usage*2(%)
J-SPACE	7.94	0.20

*1: Fraction of Usage in Total Resources: Weighted average of three resource types (Computing, File System, and Archiver).

*2: Fraction of Usage：Percentage of usage relative to each resource used in one year.