Towards Real-Time Fully Coupled Flight Dynamics and CFD Simulations of the Helicopter/Ship Dynamic Interface

This study represents the ongoing efforts of a project whose ultimate goal is real-time virtual dynamic interface modeling and simulation with fully coupled Navier-Stokes CFD with a helicopter flight dynamics simulation. The coupling between GENHEL-PSU/CRUNCH CFD has been developed in a recent work and successful results of fully coupled flight dynamics and CFD simulations of rotorcraft/ship dynamic interface were presented. In the coupled simulations, the flight dynamics model is free to move within a computational domain, where the main rotor forces are converted to source terms in the momentum equations of the CFD solution. Simultaneously, the CFD solver calculates induced velocities that are fed back to the simulation and affect the aerodynamic loads in the flight dynamics. The CFD solver models the inflow, ground effect, and interactional aerodynamics in the flight dynamics simulation. An actuator disk model was used to map rotor blade loads into the computational domain. In order to enhance stability and efficiency of the CFD solution, rotor source terms are applied onto vertically stacked planes with a 1D Gaussian distribution. In this work, the simulation framework for fully coupled piloted flight dynamics/CFD is demonstrated for a simplified shedding wake example. Improvements to the coupling interface are described that allow the simulation to run at real-time execution speeds on currently available computing platforms, demonstrating a simulation framework for pilot-in-the-loop CFD (PILCFD) flight simulation.