Aerodynamic investigation of a helicopter rotor hovering in the vicinity of a building

At the end of 2014, the Group for Aeronautical Research and Technology in EURope (GARTEUR) launched an action group (named AG22) in order to address both experimentally and numerically the issue of rotor wake interacting with obstacles. Within this group, several different experiments were set up and the results were provided to all the partners in order to compare and improve their numerical methods aimed at capturing interaction effects. In the present paper, we numerically investigate the experimental database provided by Politecnico di Milano (Polimi). A low fidelity method based on free wake approach and also CFD computations with different level of modeling are compared to experimental data. It shows that free wake approach is perfectly suitable to predict interaction effects on the rotor loads as long as there is no wake re-ingestion by the rotor. In other cases, the use of CFD is mandatory. However, computational cost can greatly be reduced using some approximation (no fuselage, immersed boundary method approach for the building, wall slip boundary condition on the ground) without significant loss in the rotor loads accuracy. Moreover, such approximation still gives acceptable results with regards to the effects of the rotor wake on the building itself and across the flowfield.