Real-Time Simulation Methodology for Rotor-Airwake Interactions

The overall objective of this proposal is to develop a physics based methodology that is capable of simulating two-way coupled, non-linear interaction of ship-airwake and helicopter rotor-wake in flow-through in a real-time fashion, and to demonstrate the prototype method in the Manned Flight Simulator (MFS) for a piloted simulation. We focus on demonstrating the critical importance of taking fully into account the non-linear two-ways interactions between the ship airwake and the rotor-wake of a helicopter landing on a ship deck, and that the simulation can proceed in real time by exploiting graphics-processing-unit (GPU) based parallel computation techniques. To achieve this objective, we rely upon the following technology components, 1) GPU based parallelism, 2) adaptive vorticity confinement (AVC) technique, 3) efficient and flexible rotor models, 4) efficient numerical method for block-structured inviscid flow system 5) dynamic/moving overset grid to model rotor in maneuver 6) Simulink based coupling of CFD and flight-simulator In Phase-1 the feasibility of the above real-time methodology will be demonstrated for realistic rotor-airwake interactions with the rotor-wake in stationary position in the vicinity of a generic ship superstructure. In Phase II, the proposed real-time modeling approach is extended to account for the circulation effects of a helicopter moving through the ship airwake in real-time. A decomposition technique of linear and non-linear regimes of interaction is employed to maximize computational efficiency. The software enhancement and its validation will be carried out entirely in GPU based computational framework.