Development of a Modularized Virtual Flight Simulator based on Multiple Discipline Coupled Method

Abstract

The problem of aircraft control involves multiple subjects and has always been extremely complicated in mechanics modelling. Virtual flight simulation was put forward in order to reduce the cost of full-scale airplane flying test and wind tunnel experiment. A typical virtual flight simulator includes a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) solver, a structure dynamics (FD) function, and a flight controller. However, existed virtual flight solver usually ignores the universal modelling of dynamics for complex aircraft configuration and the modularization of CFD, FD and flight controller module, which makes it very inconvenient for many in-house virtual flight codes for engineering application and commercial software development. A new framework of virtual flight simulation platform is established with a parallel Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) solver, a structured moving overlapping grid function, a generic multiple body dynamics (MBD) solver, and a plug-in type flight controller platform. A universal data exchange interface between MBD and flight controller is presented. An X-wing missile flying forward and pitching-up maneuvering validation case is conducted with the current virtual flight simulator, the result is compared with Matlab Simulink solver based on steady aerodynamic database and good agreement is obtained.