Section Ill
Helicopter Engineering
85Chapter 18
Preliminary Design
The January 1981 issue of Rotor and Wing Inter
national contained an article about a brainstorm-
jing session to develop the requirements for a
“dream machine for public service.” The first
paragraph read:
“Aw, c'mon, you guys. A helicopter that turns
‘up 200 knots’all the time, 300 knots for 30 min-
utes, and with four hours’ endurance? One that will
hover out of ground effect at 10,000 feet on one ex-
gine and 20,000 on both? With a max gross weight
f 10,000 pounds and a 20-foot rotor? You've gotta
be kidding.”
Well, kidding or not, this ambitious wishlist can
be used as the basis for a miniexercise in the art of
back-of-the-envelope preliminary design.
A designer will start his preliminary effort. by
drawing “cartoons” much like those in Figure 18-1
—but he can't go very far without also doing some
calculations in the fields of aerodynamics, power-
plants, and weights. With a few stateof-the-art
charts, however, he can make ballpark estimates
of most critical design parameters in a surprising
ly short time,
Start at the beginning
‘The gross weight is usually not known at first,
s0 most design efforts start with a guess that gets
refined as the calculations go on. in this case, a
‘gross of 10,000 pounds (4,500 kg) has been speci-
fied and so will be used as a firm requirement. The
{initial round of calculations are aimed at deter-
mining how niuch of this 10,000 pounds is avail-
able for structural weight. The first step isto geta
handle on the useful load—which in this case will
be defined as people plus special equipment re-
quired for “public service” plus fuel. Assuming a
crew of two and six passengers, st 180 pounds
‘each, gives a people weight of 1,440 pounds. The
‘weight of the special equipment over a plain vanil-
a helicopter is assumed to be 1,000 pounds.
That's the easy part, To determine the fuel re-
quired, we have to estimate the size of the power-
plant, ‘This will be dictated either by the high-
‘speed requirement or by the hover requirement.
At this stage, itis hard to tell which flight condi-
tion requires the most power, so both have to be
examined.
Power required at high speed
Leaving the challenge of actually designing a
800-knot rotor for later, we can make a rough esti-
mate of how much power is required by assuming
Figure 18-1
Typical Starting Cartoons for a New DesignPreli
inary Design
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Figure 18-2
Estimated Drag Area
For Streamlined Helicopters
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Figure 18:3
Power Required At High Speed
Parasite Org
12 square feet
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Figure 184
Power Loading At Sea Level
Power Leading pounds per hp)
ST aa
ise Laating pounds per square foot)
thatat very high speeds, 70% of the installed pow-
er is needed to overcome parasite drag. Drag is a
funetion of speed and the sircraft’s drag area. Fig-
ture 18-2 shows a curve of parasite drag area vs.
gross weight for reasonably streamlined helicop-
ters based on past experience. Using this curve for
‘our purposes, our10,000-pound helicopter will have
a parasite drag area of 12 square feet.
Figure 18-3 gives the installed power to push 12
square feet of drag area through the air at sea lev-
el. Todo the 80-minute dash at 300 knots, our heli-
copter needs 4,830 hp. For cruise at 200 knots, the
required power is only 1,430 hp.
Power required to hover
‘At a given altitude, the number of pounds of air
frame weight that can be hovered by one horse-
power is primarily governed by induced power—
‘which is a function of the disc loading. Such fac-
tors as rotor profile power, tail-rotor power, trans-
mission losses, and download characteristics
affect the power required only in secondary ways
and so assumptions made about these losses do
not have to be extremely accurate to be useful for
our immediate purposes.
Figure 18-4 shows the installed power loading
at sea level as a function of disc loading. The top
curve is for no losses and represents only induced
power. This is an absolute maximum above which
the laws of physics would be violated. The second
‘curve is for helicopters without tail rotors where
all the losses have been assumed to be 30% of in
duced power. The third curve is for helicopters
with tail rotors where an additional 10% power
penalty has been applied.
‘At altitude, the induced power goes up because
the rotor must work harder on the thinner air. At
the same time, the ability of the engine to put out
power goes down. At 10,000 feet, a typical turbine
engine can generate only about 75% of what it
could at sea level. The effect of these two trends on
‘the power loading is shown on Figure 18-5 for the
tailrotorless configuration as defined by the num-
ber of pounds that can be lifted by each horsepow-
er of the sea level power rating.
Our helicopter design with a gross weight of
10,000 pounds and a rotor diameter of 20 feet has
‘disc loading of 31.8 pounds per square foot (which
creates a problem in itself in terms of downwash
velocity and autorotational capability). Hovering
‘at 10,000 feet with one engine out requires a sea
level rating of 2,940 hp or a total of 5,880 if this is
to bea twin-engine helicopter. Hovering at 20,000
feet with all engines operating is a little less de-
manding, requiring only 4,170 horsepower. Since
the power required to fly 300 knots was 4,830,
hover at 10,000 feet on one engine is the critical
condition for choosing the powerplant.
87