Project overview
Flight simulation is commonly used for evaluating the behaviour of air vehicles during engineering design and for pilot training, however there a number of situations encountered in operational flying where the physics embedded within the simulator, particularly in relation to the unsteady coupling between the flow induced by the vehicle wake and its feedback in determining the dynamics of the vehicle, can miss essential elements of the problem. Practical examples include rotorcraft operating in the airwake of a ship, in relatively rapid decent, or in the proximity to the ground or buildings where the rotor wake can be recirculated back into the rotors leading to unexpected and hazardous flight behaviour. This project aims to explore techniques whereby the fluid behaviour can be determined in 'real-time' by numerical solvers running on large-scale parallel computers while at the same time being tightly coupled with the vehicle dynamics. It will involve modifying an existing parallel turbulence simulation code by adding an embedded lifting line representation of the lifting surfaces and adapting a local flight simulator to provide the computational steering in a fully coupled way. The system will be used to demonstrate flight simulations of some challenging flight situations in 'real time' and with a high degree of physical fidelity within the flow.