Analysis of a bending-torsion coupled actuator for a smart rotor with active blade tips

Active rotorblade tips offer an alternative approach to the challenge of main rotor active vibration control. The tips are pitched with respect to the main blade via a piezo-driven bending-torsion coupled actuator beam that runs down the length of the blade. A Vlasov based, specialized one-dimensional finite beam element is developed to model the rotating actuator beam and is validated with the free-vibration and static forced response of 4:1 and 2:1 aspect ratio, bending-torsion coupled, active and passive plates. A one-eighth scale, reduced tip-speed rotor model (tip Mach 0.26), incorporating the bending-torsion actuator beam, has been previously hover tested (open loop). In these tests, blade tip deflections of the order of 2° (half peak-to-peak) were achieved at 2, 3, 4, 5/rev with corresponding dynamic vertical blade root shear variations of the order of 10-20% of the nominal blade lift at 8° collective ( C T /σ = 0.07). The test results are used to validate a coupled actuator and elastic rotorblade model. The correlation of the predicted active blade-tip pitch deflections and the experimental data is within 20%. The predicted values for the active vertical root shears are within the same margin for 4° and 6° collective.