The team behind Lord’s hub-mounted vibration suppressor (HMVS) technology has received the American Helicopter Society (AHS) Grover E. Bell award.

 The award is given for an outstanding research and experimentation contribution to the field of vertical flight development brought to fruition during the preceding calendar year. It was created by Larry Bell, founder of Bell Aircraft (now Bell Helicopter Textron), in 1957 in honor of his older brother, Grover, who was killed in an aircraft crash in 1913. The team, composed of Lord, the U.S. Army and Sikorsky Aircraft, received the award May 6 during AHS International’s 71st Annual Forum and Technology Display in Virginia Beach, Va.

Designed to reduce weight, eliminate vibration and deliver a smoother helicopter ride, the HMVS system seeks to actively cancel rotor-induced vibration at its source. Compared with traditional hub-mounted passive treatments, HMVS provides enhanced vibration control at a greatly reduced weight. The HMVS team at Lord includes Mark Jolly, Ph.D., manager of mechanical and sensing research; Russ Altieri, senior staff engineer; Gregory Fricke, Ph.D., staff engineer; John Nagle, staff program manager; and Dan Kakaley, engineer.

HMVS was demonstrated aboard a Sikorsky UH-60A Black Hawk at the U.S. Army’s Aviation Applied Technology Directorate at Fort Eustis, Va., in March last year as part of the Active Rotor Component Demonstration program. Flight regimes included progression from a hover to 150 knots, autorotations and 60-degree-bank turns. The HMVS cancels the largest vibratory loads near the source of the vibration, which is the main rotor hub, thus keeping the loads from propagating into the airframe. In preliminary flight-testing, the HMVS was found to reduce vibration significantly, reducing weight by 30 percent compared with the standard bifilar anti-vibration system on the Black Hawk.

The HMVS is composed of a housing mounted on top of the main rotor hub that contains four brushless electric ring motors, each fitted with a tungsten mass. Electrical power comes from the slip ring powering the rotor anti-icing system. As the main rotor blades begin to produce vibration loads in forward flight, the masses move closer together in phase to counter it. One pair of masses spins in the direction of the main rotor and the other spins opposite at four times the speed of the main rotor.