DISCLAIMER

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/rotare

Keep 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.

Documentation

Rotare comes with a detailed documentation. This documentation is made of two parts:

1. The user manual
2. 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.