A morphing segmented concept is proposed herein for future extreme-scale wind turbine systems. The morphing may be accomplished by using segmented blades connected by screw sockets and a tension cable system. At low wind and rotor speeds, the segmented blades are fully tensioned and set at high pitch to ensure start-up and maximum power at low speeds. At high rotor rpm, the cable tension can be...

The advancement on Wireless Sensor Networks for vibration monitoring presents important possibilities for helicopter rotor health and usage monitoring. While main rotor blades account for the main source of lift for helicopters, rotor induced vibration establishes an important source for understanding the rotor performance and blade condition. A discussion on the dual character of blades as rot...

Stability and control of rotors at high advance ratio are considered. Stability of teetering, articulated, and gimbaled hub types is considered with a simple flapping blade analysis. Rotor control in autorotation for teetering and articulated hub types is examined in more detail for a compound helicopter (rotor and fixed wing) using the comprehensive analysis CAMRAD II. Autorotation is found to...

The results of strength and gas dynamic improvement of turbocharger TK-32 axial turbine are presented. Turbocharger was manufactured by LLC “Penzadieselmash” (Penza, Russian) and is used as unit boost for diesel locomotive. The goal of this work was to ensure turbine work capacity when rotor speed is increased by 10% without efficiency reduction. The strain-stress state analysis indicated the r...

This paper presents a means for reducing the torque variation during the revolution of a vertical-axis water turbine (VAWaterT) by increasing the blade number. For this purpose, twodimensional CFD analyses have been performed on a straight-bladed Darrieus-type rotor. After describing the computational model and the relative validation procedure, a complete campaign of simulations, based on full...

As a rotorcraft descends or manoeuvres, the interactions which occur between the rotor blades and vortical structures within the rotor wake produce highly impulsive loads on the blades and with these a highly intrusive external noise. Brown’s Vorticity Transport Model has been used to investigate the influence of the fidelity of the local blade aerodynamic model on the quality of the prediction...

Ultrasonic guided waves are used to detect the delamination between skin and honeycomb of a composite helicopter rotor blade. Theoretical work is carried out for guided waves in the trailing edge of a rotor blade, which is a multilayer composite skin/NOMEX half space structure. The dispersion relation is obtained with the global matrix method. Theoretically driven experiments are conducted on a...

The production of rotor blades for wind turbines is still a predominantly manual process. Process simulation is an adequate way of improving blade quality without a significant increase in production costs. This paper introduces a module for tolerance simulation for rotor-blade production processes. The investigation focuses on the simulation of temperature distribution for one-sided, self-heat...

This paper outlines progress towards realising practical quad-rotor robot helicopters and, in particular, the Australian National University’s ‘X-4 Flyer’ platform. Two challenges facing the X-4 are generating sufficient thrust and managing unstable dynamic behaviour. We address these issues with a rotor design technique for maximising thrust and the application of a novel rotor mast configurat...