Simulation of Flow Around ROBIN-Mod7 Fuselage with PSP Rotor using Viscous Surface-Vorticity Compressible-Flow Panel Method

Abstract:
This study evaluates the capability of Simcenter™ Flightstream™, a viscous surface-vorticity compressible-flow panel method, for predicting aerodynamic performance of rotorcraft configurations. Simulations are performed on the ROBIN-mod7 fuselage, PSP rotor, and combined rotor-fuselage system under conditions consistent with available experimental data. Results are compared against experiments and high-fidelity CFD methods, including DES, URANS, and IBM-ASM. For the isolated fuselage, Simcenter Flightstream accurately captures surface pressure distributions, particularly in attached flow regions. For the isolated rotor, thrust, torque, and figure of merit trends show strong agreement with reference data. In the rotor-fuselage configuration, the solver successfully captures interaction effects and predicts performance within experimental uncertainty. Notably, Simcenter Flightstream achieves these results with one to two orders of magnitude lower computational cost compared to high-fidelity approaches. The findings demonstrate its effectiveness as a rapid, cost-efficient tool for early-stage rotorcraft aerodynamic design and analysis.

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