Autonomous UAV Aerodynamic Performance Analysis for the Near-Ship Environment

The proposed research program aims to develop an efficient, high-fidelity simulation tool for ship-board flight testing of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that provides a computational testbed for UAV design, autonomous control system design, and UAV/Ship integration analysis. The envisioned flight simulation approach will employ a library of existing high fidelity ship airwake datasets generated via CFD, coupled to a reduced-order aerodynamic model by an unsteady boundary condition. Offline models for the rotor disk loading, autonomous controllers, etc., can be linked to the aerodynamic model to predict the reaction of the UAV system to the unsteady ship airwake environment. Phase I will develop and demonstrate a simulation approach for a small UAV configuration recovering to a ship. Reduced-order aerodynamic modeling approaches including panel methods, one-way coupled Euler CFD, and one-way coupled Navier-Stokes CFD, will be evaluated. The relative fidelity and efficiency of the three approaches will be compared to a fully coupled CFD simulation of the same UAV/Ship combination. Experiments will be performed to demonstrate the capabilities to gather detailed data for validation of the numerical models. The proposing team consists of CRAFT Tech and Prof. Lawrence Ukeiley of the Research and Engineering Education Facility (REEF) at the University of Florida.