Helicopter swashplate function

Animation demonstrating swashplate function in most helicopters. No narration (yet). For the uninitiated, the swashplate is the mechanical device that transfers the pilots input (the cyclic stick) to the spinning rotor. It's tricky because the cyclic stick doesn't usually directly tilt the rotor mast, but causes the rotor disk to fly to the desired tilt. That's why, in the animation, when there's no air, the rotor just spins with no change in tilt. Add air and the rotor blades then fly up or down to acheive the degree of rotor disk tilt desired by the pilot. Please leave criticisms and suggestions as comments. Thanks.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• swashx2Hbest

[WonderingMindfully]

pieraro01: Thank you! It was my frustration understanding those manuals that prompted me to build these animations. Building them helped me when I was learning to fly and I hope they'll help others.

[WonderingMindfully]

Gyroscopic precession results in the lift forces generated by the rotor blades being expressed physically 90 degrees later in the direction of rotation. So increased pitch and lift on the left side is expressed as a forward tilt of the rotor disk. The cyclic control is rigged to correct for this precession so that forward tilt of the cyclic results in forward tilt of the rotor disk. Playing with spinning bicycle wheel is a great way to get a feel for this effect.

[Johnny31297]

Very good animation. What a program is that?

[WonderingMindfully]

The animation was built with Blender 3D

[pieraro01]

Fantastic. Great animation to understand easily collective, cyclic and swashplate functions, better than aerodynamics manuals!

[Obelix6]

I would leave the "no air / add air" out of it, that is just going to confuse people. Of course it is correct. Good animation though.

[rajsingh0621]

Thank you

[rajsingh0621]

I noticed one thing and it caused a little confusion. During forward flight, I noticed the rotor blades when on the left side had the highest pitch and when on the right side had the lowest pitch, while equal pitch when in the front and in the back.

I would have assumed higher pitch when in the back and lower pitch when in the front, when the helicopter moves forward. Is there something I'm not understanding here?

Thanks.

[bunker931]

Just for some additional info:

On some helicopter, the swash plate is lowered when pilot want to increase the pitch.

By the way, the left model's rotation axe is a little bit too exagerated. I meant too exagerated.

Good stuff tho.