DISCLAIMER
Rotare is still IN BETA VERSION.
The first official stable release will be version 1.0.0. Any version prior to 1.0.0 can be considered as alpha/beta. This means that options are likely to change (quite significantly), bugs or plain mistakes/errors may also be present. At the moment, the code has not been fully validated. Use at your own risks.
Rotare is a feature-rich and open-source implementation of the Blade Element Momentum Theory in MATLAB.
This software can be used for the analysis and the design of all kinds of rotors: helicopters main/tail rotors, aircraft propellers, etc. Future versions will also be able to model wind/tidal turbines as well as rotors in autorotation.
Rotare was developed primarily for teaching purposes at the University of Liege (Belgium) by Thomas Lambert during his Ph.D. The code was later extended to add different solvers, many extensions to the base methodology and to support more complex geometries. It is now a complete analysis tool that can be used in a wide range of applications outside of academia.
Features
A more exhaustive list of features can be found in the complete documentation that will be made available with version 1.0.0.
Types of rotors
- Helicopters main or tail rotors
- Aircraft propellers
- Wind/tidal turbines
Geometry
- Varying airfoil along the blade
- Custom twist/taper
- Coaxial rotors
- Overlapping rotors
Flow
- Steady/Hover
- Axial flow
- Oblique flow (single rotor only)
Extensions/corrections
- Tip/Hub losses
- Compressibility
- Tip relief
- Spinner effects
Solvers
Rotare implements 4 different solvers. Each one solves a different form of the BEMT equations. Note that some of these solvers use additional hypotheses and may not provide valid results in all situations.
Installation and utilization
Download and install
Using git
To download the latest working version of Rotare, simply run
git clone --recursive https://gitlab.uliege.be/rotare/rotareKeep it updated using git pull --recurse-submodules.
Direct download
If you do not use git, the best way to obtain a working version of rotare is
to download the latest stable version from the release page.
Note: Rotare uses dependencies which are not directly hosted in this
repository. Simply downloading Rotare's repo will therefore not be enough!
A special archive is available for each release in the release page under the
name COMPLETE CODE. This archive contains all the dependencies needed for the
proper use of Rotare. Always download this one and not the automatically
generated source code archives.
In theory, no additional toolboxes should be required to work with Rotare.
Documentation
Rotare comes with a detailed documentation. This documentation is made of two parts:
- The user manual
- The technical documentation
The user manual focuses on the practical aspects of the software, such as requirements, installation, usage, etc. The technical documentation provides a full description of the code architecture, details regarding the methodology, the solvers implementations, etc.
Every Rotare function comes with an extended help. This help can be printed in
the command window by executing help <functionName>.
Issues and troubleshooting
If you encounter some issue while using this code, please read carefully the error message. The user configuration file is validated with a custom function to ensure that the inputs are correct. If the error is due to incorrect user input, a meaningful error message is outputted to help you fix your configuration.
If the error has nothing to do with your configuration, please check first the troubleshooting section of the documentation.
If you encounter any other issue with this code, please check the issue tracker and fill a new issue report if applicable. You can also contact me directly at tlambert@uliege.be.
Other
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Theo Delvaux for his initial implementation of the
oblique flight with the indfact solver. We would also like to thank Johan Le
for his work on the implementation of coaxial rotors during his master thesis.
Their excellent contributions facilitated considerably the final implementation of these features in Rotare.
Contributions
Any contribution or feature-request is welcomed. Feel free to use the issue tracker if you want to discuss interesting additions to this software.
License
The Rotare Software is provided under the MIT license.