Edgy new blades ease Eurocopter noise footprint
New technology is a main focus of Eurocopter at Heli-Expo 2010.

New technology is a main focus of Eurocopter at Heli-Expo 2010. At its booth (No. 3128) the company is showing rotor blade technologies designed to reduce noise and vibration, and an avionics technology that promises to improve pilot situational awareness and safety.

Eurocopter’s Blue Edge is a passive system that features a redesigned main rotor blade that uses a double-swept shape to reduce the noise generated by blade-vortex interactions (BVI), which occur when blade-tip vortices interact with the rotor blades. A five-blade Blue Edge main rotor has logged more than 75 hours on an EC155 testbed, demonstrating a noise reduction of three to four decibels. Eurocopter says it is ready to move Blue Edge into “serial applications.”

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