Vorticity Based Reduced Order Ship Airwake Model for Aircraft Flight Simulation Integration

Continuum Dynamics, Inc. (CDI) with collaborators from Washington University and Princeton University will develop a reduced-order ship airwake modeling approach for engineering and piloted flight dynamics simulation applications. Simulation of naval aviation operations requires that the aerodynamic disturbance due to the ship be accurately modeled so that pilot control usage and aircraft response characteristics are representative of launch and recovery operations. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) has been successfully used to construct ship airwake models, although these airwake datasets typically introduce several implementation challenges. Specific challenges include managing large storage requirements for the airwake data and verification that the models are aligned with simulated aircraft response. It is desirable to develop an airwake model order reduction method that allows the fidelity of the simulated aircraft response to be unaffected while addressing implementation challenges associated with the large datasets resulting from offline CFD analysis. In Phase I, several model order reduction schemes will be investigated that preserve the vorticity transport to the level of accuracy needed for flight dynamics simulation. These methods will be evaluated using a representative CFD dataset to yield maximum reduction of storage while preserving physical fidelity and addressing practical implementation issues including model verification and real-time operation.