Physics-Based Rotorcraft/Ship Aerodynamic Interaction Modeling in Support of Real Time Flight Simulation

Abstract

This paper describes a physics-based rotorcraft/ship aerodynamic interaction modeling method in support of real time flight simulation. The widely used Peters-He finite state dynamic wake model (Ref. 1 ) was augmented using the simulation results obtained from a first-principle based hybrid solver which couples a grid-free viscous Vortex Particle Method (VPM) with an unstructured CFD solver. The fully coupled VPM/CFD solution addresses the challenging rotorcraft/ship interaction problem and was shown to capture the physics of the mutual aerodynamic interactions between the rotor wake and the ship airwake disturbance. However, the VPM/CFD solution is too computationally expensive to support any real time simulation applications. The finite state dynamic rotor wake model, on the other hand, has already been routinely used in real time rotorcraft flight simulation. The augmented finite state dynamic wake model accounts for the physics of the rotor/ship mutual aerodynamic interactions and provides an accurate and efficient solution. The paper discusses the modeling methodology and the associated algorithms used to augment the finite state dynamic wake model via a coupled VPM/CFD solution. It was demonstrated that the augmented model accurately captures the essential physics of the rotorcraft/ship aerodynamic interaction and, at the same time, is computationally fast enough to support real time simulation.