Helicopter ground resonance — a spatial model analysis

Abstract

Classic theory of helicopter ground resonance studies the phenomenon on a planar model obtained by reducing the dynamic parameters of the full helicopter into the plane of rotation. In this paper the phenomenon is studied on a spatial helicopter model of six degrees of body freedom. It is found that in general there exist six regions of instability, whereas the planar theory of Coleman determines only one region. The theoretical results obtained here are verified by experiments conducted on a dynamic model of helicopter. In addition, this paper reviews all the existing analyses which have studied the problem.