How to Reduce the Noise Your Helicopter Makes

Experts at the American space agency are using the NASA Advanced Supercomputing facility's Pleiades Supercomputer to study the manner in which rotor blades interact with the vortices they themselves create.

This line of study is extremely important for a number of civilian and military applications, such as improving overall vehicle performance and reducing the amount of noise helicopters and other type of rotorcraft produce. The US military wouldn't mind noiseless helicopters a single bit, I daresay.

However, figuring out exactly how the interactions occur is no meant feat, which is why NASA called on the supercomputing power of the Pleiades. The simulations, a screenshot of which is attached here, are being conducted by the NASA Subsonic Rotary Wing Project.

“This snapshot of a V-22 rotorcraft in hover shows a cross-section of the blade vortices and turbulent flow, where magenta is high vorticity (spin) and blue is low,” NASA says of the image.