Preliminary Considerations In Ducted Fan Propulsion System Design

Author : Marc-Antoine Breault
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (139 download)

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Download or read book Assessment of the Actuator Line Method Applied to Ducted Fan Geometries written by Marc-Antoine Breault and published by . This book was released on 2023 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The emerging market of urban air mobility alongside the increasing number of hybrid-electric or purely electric propulsion systems has renewed the interest of the aeronautical sector for ducted fans. Ducted propulsion systems are particularly well suited for these use cases, as they often result in power savings during flight missions where hovering and low flight speed are prominent. Other advantages of ducted fans include lower and more directional sound emissions and inherently increased safety. When designing these systems, the aerodynamicist can choose between rapid but low-fidelity tools such as numerical methods based on the momentum theory, or more accurate but also more time-consuming tools such as wall-resolved CFD. In between these two extremes, there are also medium-fidelity tools available if a more detailed solution is needed but resorting to wall-resolved CFD is still cost-prohibitive. Although medium-fidelity methods are well developed and continue to make progress for conventional unducted rotors, their application to their ducted counterpart is years behind the state of the art for open rotors. Inspired by one of these medium-fidelity methods called the Actuator Line Method (ALM), which is widely adopted by the scientific community and extensively used for open rotor simulations, the aim of this work is to extend the ALM to ducted geometries. This research project is conducted in collaboration with the industrial partner Bell Textron Canada® which provided the studied ducted fan geometry as well as experimental data used to validate the ALM code. Since the flow inside a ducted propulsion system is quite complex and involves a strong interaction between the duct and the rotor, simpler validation cases are also used to validate specific attributes of the ALM code. The ALM results indicate that the technique is suitable for simulating ducted propulsion systems. It is particularly interesting for rapid computation of performance curves and for evaluating the effect of macroscopic changes such as the number of blades, rotational speed or rotor diameter. Shortcomings in the predictive capabilities are also reported concerning more local effects, such as the behaviour of the blade loading at the tip of the blade. Nevertheless, the ALM developed in this work still allows the design space to be explored rapidly and at a reduced computational cost when compared with wall-resolved CFD. This work presents the theory behind the ALM code, the underlying physical models as well as a detailed comparison of the ALM results with wind tunnel and wall-resolved CFD data. Numerous improvements to the code are also proposed for future research on the subject.