Simulation of a Light Aircraft Encountering a Helicopter Wake

Wang, Yaxing, White, Mark ORCID: 0000-0002-8611-9525, Barakos, George, Tormey, P and Pantazopoulou, P (2015) Simulation of a Light Aircraft Encountering a Helicopter Wake. Journal of Aircraft, 52 (2). pp. 510-523.

Text AIAA_wake_encounter_corrected_leishman.pdf - Author Accepted Manuscript Download (13MB)

Abstract

Different methods of modeling helicopter wakes are presented and compared with available wind-tunnel and flight-test data. A free-wake model was then used to generate the wake vortices of a helicopter hover-taxiing over an airport runway. A hybrid wake model, with a wake decay law, was also used to generate the far wake of a helicopter in level flight. The wake-induced velocity fields were integrated into an aircraft flight dynamics model, and piloted flight simulations were carried out to study a light aircraft encountering a helicopter wake during landing and level flight. It was found that, for the current landing wake-encounter scenario, the existing wake-encounter criteria and severity metrics for the determination of the hazardous distance might not be appropriate if the wake encounter occurs close to the ground. The landing simulation results suggest that, for a helicopter in low-speed hover-taxiing (less than 40 kt airspeed), the wake-encounter detectable horizontal distance is about three times the diameter of the rotor, which coincides with the current safety guidelines of the Civil Aviation Authority of the United Kingdom. The level-flight simulations revealed the effects of the vertical separation distance and of the wake decay on the encounter severity.

Item Type:	Article
Depositing User:	Symplectic Admin
Date Deposited:	21 Mar 2017 11:21
Last Modified:	19 Jan 2023 07:09
DOI:	10.2514/1.C032761
Related URLs:	Author Publisher
URI:	https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/3006543