XV-15 Rotor Hover Validation. A Multifidelity Assessment of Rotor Performance Modeling
The XV-15 rotor is a widely studied and experimentally documented rotor, making it a strong validation case for rotor performance prediction. This benchmark validates Flow360's lower-fidelity rotor modeling approaches while also demonstrating the high accuracy achievable with DDES in one of the most challenging operating conditions, hover. The study evaluates XV-15 rotor hover performance across five blade pitch settings using a multifidelity modeling approach spanning BET disk, BET line, and DDES. Thrust, torque, and figure of merit predictions are compared across fidelity levels against experimental data. The results demonstrate strong agreement with experiment across the full set of operating conditions and show how Flow360 supports efficient rotor performance analysis at different levels of fidelity.
Comparison of Flow360 predictions against reference data. Click an image to expand.
