Real-time computational fluid dynamics for flight simulation

Kenny, James, Takeda, Kenji and Thomas, Glyn (2008) Real-time computational fluid dynamics for flight simulation. The Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation & Education Conference (I/ITSEC), Orlando, USA. 01 - 04 Dec 2008. 8 pp .

Abstract

A service oriented architecture is described that enables computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations to run alongside a human-in-the-loop flight simulator; thereby informing the behavior of a simulated aircraft whilst it is being piloted. The scenario of a helicopter landing on a moving ship at sea, is used as an example application.
A generic service-oriented architecture is presented that allows coupling of a real-time flight simulator, flight dynamics model and CFD simulation running on a high performance computer. The case study used is performing unsteady CFD calculations used to model the aerodynamic development of, and interaction between, the ship and helicopter wakes; The CFD code resides on a cluster computer and is exposed to a PC-based flight simulator as a service, enabling two-way data exchange between the CFD and flight model whilst the simulation is running. Real-time analysis of the CFD results and control inputs allows prediction of the forces acting on the helicopter rotor, this is fed into a full six degree of freedom flight model. Performance results for the full end-to-end architecture are presented to demonstrate the capability, and limitations, of this approach.
The paper concludes with a short discussion regarding the potential for this architecture to provide a generic representation of aircraft-environment interactions, and their influence on performance and handling. Implementing a more accurate representation of these phenomena in flight simulators could improve the ability to prepare pilots for challenging tasks such as: landing on ships, flying in urban environments, dealing with „brown-out? conditions, and encountering the wakes of other aircraft.

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