Synthetic Free Flight

The destructive expendable (DEX) is a highly promising way to defend small aircraft such as unmanned aerial vehicles. To evaluate the potential of DEXs, accurate simulation of their flight path is essential. The mission of a destructive expendable (DEX), though brief, is aerodynamically very complex. AeroArts proposes an experimental technique to simulate unsteady DEX aerodynamics. The technique capitalizes on and extends the recently demonstrated utility of instrumented water tunnels to explore unsteady and nonlinear aerodynamics of high performance aircraft. The acquired data will then form the basis for a greatly improved simulation of the DEX dynamics.