Section Ill Helicopter Engineering 85Chapter 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 DesignPreli inary Design a Figure 18-2 Estimated Drag Area For Streamlined Helicopters » i i Ee gs iu $4 i sage aise inom sage | i ra ress Wah ponds) Figure 18:3 Power Required At High Speed Parasite Org 12 square feet eer Forword Speed frat] ao 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