#Helicopter airfoil for free

Instead, the rotor is tilted, which orients the lift vector away from the vertical direction.

Thrust: Unlike fixed-wing aircraft or jets, thrust is not produced by the engine directly.

Gravity: Obviously a helicopter does not manipulate gravity, but by exerting just enough lift to counteract gravity, the helicopter can hover at a fixed altitude.

Lift: As the rotor blade spins, airflow across the bottom of the rotor blade produces lift to counteract gravity.Technically, a helicopter’s rotor blades are a set of airfoils, and they can produce lift in the same way as the wing on a fixed-wing aircraft.Ī helicopter’s main rotor interacts with the surrounding airflow to manipulate the main aerodynamic forces in the following manner: Attached to the engine are the main rotor blades, which rotate against the surrounding air to produce a flow along each rotor blade. Overview of Helicopter AerodynamicsĪll helicopters have two rotors that generate the lift and thrust required to steer the aircraft as well as stabilize the helicopter against unwanted rotation. In this article, we’ll look more at the basics of how a helicopter generates its lift and thrust with only a single main rotor as well as how the design of the rotor influences helicopter aerodynamics. Helicopter aerodynamics involves the same forces that arise in airplane aerodynamics, but these forces arise in different ways due to fluid flow across the aircraft.

#Helicopter airfoil for free

The correspondence between helicopter aerodynamics and airplane aerodynamics spans beyond the need for free stream flow across an airfoil. The tail rotor is responsible for stabilizing the helicopter so that it does not rotate under torque from the rotor. The blades on a helicopter’s main rotor have an angle of attack, which plays the same role as a wing in an airplane. Helicopters take advantage of free stream flow along a rotor blade to produce lift and thrust.