Advanced Rotor Wake Interference Modeling for Multiple Aircraft Shipboard Landing Simulation

Progress has been made in modeling and simulation of the shipboard operation cases to support analysis of the single aircraft landing task. However, limitations exist where the analysis does not include the interference arising from simultaneous operation of multiple aircraft on the same ship. To improve all aspects, especially flight safety, of shipboard operations with multiple aircraft, the interaction between the ship and the aircraft, as well as between multiple aircraft, must be addressed. This paper discusses the efforts in (1) enhancing Peters-He’s finite state dynamic wake model with a far field wake variation model including effective wake skew, wake expansion, and wake decay to support both real-time and non-real-time multi-aircraft operation modeling and analysis; (2) integrating a time-accurate free vortex wake model with FLIGHTLAB for shipboard multi-aircraft interaction analysis. The integration includes a vortex evolution model to address the vortex core growth and vortex strength variation due to the vorticity diffusion and dissipation; (3) developing a unified formulation to couple the ship motion, ship air-wake/turbulence, and multi-aircraft interference models and render an advanced ship/aircraft dynamic interface simulation model.