Experimental and computational investigation on comparison of micro-scale open rotor and shrouded rotor hovering in ground effect

Various investigations on open rotor (OR) hovering in-ground effect (IGE) are carried out, but few papers report shrouded rotor (SR) hovering IGE. This paper compares aerodynamic performance and flowfield characteristics of OR and SR hovering IGE by both experimental measurements and computational fluid dynamic (CFD) simulations. Experimental results reveal that in IGE flight, the aerodynamic performance of SR is more sensitive than that of OR. And at constant power, SR offers more thrust than OR at the same ground distance. Ground has a great influence on thrust for OR below 2.2 rotor radius distance, while for SR it shows obvious effect below 1.5 rotor radius distance. It is also shown that normalized aerodynamic coefficients of OR and SR are independent on rotor speed. In addition, for OR the rotor thrust coefficient changes nearly linearly with the logarithmic distance from ground, while for SR it changes nonlinearly. Flowfield analysis by CFD shows that shroud changes the tip flow features and expands the slipstream area of SR. When ground distance gets small, back pressure below the rotor-disk plane increases, which is more obvious for SR than OR. Furthermore, shroud thrust of SR decreases because of tip leakage flow and flow separation.