Experimental and numerical analysis of deformation in a rotating RC helicopter blade

Abstract

Rotating structures are important and commonly used in the transportation and energy generation fields, where a better understanding of the deformations these structures endure is essential for both the design and maintenance phases. This work presents a novel image sensing methodology for measuring the displacements of rotating parts in operation due to dynamic loading. This methodology employs 3D digital image correlation combined with a custom stroboscopic lighting solution to achieve apparent stillness of the target while it rotates and then processes the acquired data to remove small imprecisions and align it to the rotor's intrinsic coordinate system. It was applied to an RC helicopter, whose blade deformation was measured and compared with a computational model, using fluid-structure interaction between computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and finite element analysis (FEA). Using live measurement techniques, it was possible to obtain the actual behaviour of the blades, which can be used to validate and tune computational models. The proposed methodology complements the methods available in the literature, which were centred around relative out-of-plane displacements, by enabling the comparison of absolute out-of-plane and in-plane ones.