Rotor Calculator

Calculator to calculate rotor performance for helicopter, propeller and wind turbine applications. This tool comes as executable for download.

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On downloading the executable file and clicking on the icon a GUI (Graphical User Interface) should appear. It should contain a set of input boxes on the left and right. The left boxes can be modified to change the output, the boxes on the right give output answers. The option box on the top left allows to choose the inflow state. The program will output two files, one contains your input values and the other file contains the outputs which can be used to plot graphs, etc. See diagram below for clarity:

Running the Rotor Inflow program

The program uses rotor solidary ratio, rotor RPM, rotor blade angle of attack and rotor radius to calculate properties such inflow, thrust coefficient, thrust. The program operates by selecting a desired rotor blade angle of attack which then calculates the requires rotor pitch angle to achieve the desire rotor blade angle of attack. See some of my blog articles, Ref [1] to [3] for theory on rotor performance.

I am created the rotor dynamics software library used in this program as the essential building blocks for a helicopter flight simulator and control software for RC helicopters and other VTOL UAVs. This program obivously only calculates helicopter vertical flight and hover performance but can also calculate wind turbine and propeller performance. If there is enough interest I could create additional programs for helicopter forward flight as well as other rotor dynamics analysis, please let me know if you have questions or suggestions: [email protected].

References:

[1] http://www.eiteog.com/EiteogBLOG/No4EiteogBlogThrust.html

[2] http://www.eiteog.com/EiteogBLOG/No11EiteogBlogThrust.html

[3] http://www.eiteog.com/EiteogBLOG/No16EiteogBlogThrust.html

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