• Journal of the Korean Society for Precision Engineering
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• v.27 no.3
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• pp.73-79
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• 2010

A preliminary study on a length-variable rotor blade for a small unmanned helicopter has been conducted. After surveys on previous researches, and examining requirements for application to a small unmanned helicopter, a length-variable rotor blade was designed and manufactured to be driven by centrifugal force from rotor revolution with no mechanical actuator. The rotor blade was divided into a fixed inboard section and an outboard section sliding in span-wise direction. In order to determine the operating conditions of the length-variable rotor during revolution, and to derive the design variables of extension spring and rotor weight, a series of analyses from multi-body dynamics solution were conducted. The manufactured prototype was verified of its length-varying mechanism from a rotor stand, the results and required future improvements are discussed.

• Journal of Aerospace System Engineering
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• v.8 no.1
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• pp.12-17
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• 2014

In this paper, optimal design of composite rotor blade cross-section to consider manufacturability was performed. Skin thickness, torsion box thickness and skin lay-up angle were adopted as discrete design variables and The position and width of a torsion box were considered as continuous variables. An object function of optimal design is to minimize the mass of a rotor blade, and various constraints such as failure index, center mass, shear center, natural frequency and blade minimum mass per unit length were adopted. Finally, design variables such as the thickness and lay-up angles of a skin, and the thickness, position and width of a torsion box were determined by using an in-house program developed for the optimal design of rotor blade cross-section.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.683-705
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• 2016

A semi-active algorithm for edgewise vibration control of the spar-type floating offshore wind turbine (SFOWT) blades, nacelle and spar platform is developed in this paper. A tuned mass damper (TMD) is placed in each blade, in the nacelle and on the spar to control the vibrations for these components. A Short Time Fourier Transform algorithm is used for semi-active control of the TMDs. The mathematical formulation of the integrated SFOWT-TMDs system is derived by using Euler-Lagrangian equations. The theoretical model derived is a time-varying system considering the aerodynamic properties of the blade, variable mass and stiffness per unit length, gravity, the interactions among the blades, nacelle, spar, mooring system and the TMDs, the hydrodynamic effects, the restoring moment and the buoyancy force. The aerodynamic loads on the nacelle and the spar due to their coupling with the blades are also considered. The effectiveness of the semi-active TMDs is investigated in the numerical examples where the mooring cable tension, rotor speed and the blade stiffness are varying over time. Except for excessively large strokes of the nacelle TMD, the semi-active algorithm is considerably more effective than the passive one in all cases and its effectiveness is restricted by the low-frequency nature of the nacelle and the spar responses.