New Success Story with University of Wisconsin - Madison: Composite Rotor Blade Analysis using Altair HyperWorks
Altair Employee
Story Overview As part of a senior design project - the design and analysis of a coaxial rotor craft - Christopher Van Damme, at the time of the project senior undergraduate student within the department of Engineering Mechanics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, had to analyze a composite made helicopter rotor blade. In his analysis he had to employ Computer-Aided Engineering tools to cover the required studies regarding static, modal, frequency response, and dynamic analysis of the rotor. The CAE tools of choice were Altair"˜s HyperWorks suite, mainly HyperMesh, the pre-processor of the suite, and Altair"˜s FE-solver and optimization tool OptiStruct. The use of Altair HyperWorks, specifically HyperMesh and OptiStruct, allowed for a streamlined geometry creation and analysis of the composite rotor blade. HyperMesh enabled a quick, high fidelity meshing of the complex rotor blade cross sections over the entire length of the rotor blade and OptiStruct was used to solve a static load case of the highest load that the rotor blade would experience in flight. "It was easy to work with HyperWorks, since it has a user friendly GUI and there are a lot of tutorials available online, showing you how to set up the model and handle the analysis step by step. HyperMesh and OptiStruct allowed me to handle a detailed and streamlined analysis of the composite made rotor blade and to handle the given task in an efficient manner." -Christopher Van Damme, Masters student at the Department of Engineering Physics of the College of Engineering, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Download the PDF for the Complete Story
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