Simulation of Flexible Mechanisms in a Rotating Blade for Smart-blade Applications

The active Gurney flap technology is investigated to improve the performance of rotorblades by allowing helicopter blades to further control the lift unbalance that rises at high speed and by damping vibration loads on the rotor hub. This technology needs validation by wind tunnel testing of a scaled model blade under rotational loading. An optimised geometry of a flexible actuation system has been designed to provide motion for the deployment of the Gurney flap for a Mach-scale model blade [1]. This paper presents the refinement of the flexible actuation system to allow deployment of the Gurney flap and simulation strategies to model the mechanism under loads due to the blade motion and the aerodynamic forces acting on the Gurney flap . The physics domains are addressed separately to be simulated with specific software packages. A co-simulation process permits the simulation of the Gurney flap motion under LMS Virtual.Lab Motion multi-body dynamic software [2] and the simulation of the flexible mechanism under Comsol Multiphysics Finite Element Model software [3]. This simulation scheme successfully models the mechanism under harmonic loads. For faster actuation input, the co-simulation is replaced by a oneway coupling which models the deployment mechanism under loads due to the rotation of the blade, the motion of the Gurney flap and the aerodynamics. The outcome of both simulations shows that the flexible deployment system is suitable for the actuation of the Gurney flap in the two actuation cases presented. The simulation scheme can be applied to simulate similar systems that are under constraints from a large variety of physical domains.