System Engineering -- Thermal/Power- Efficiency Assessments of Air Vehicles

Effective and timely assessments of total thermal and power energy management is critical to the design and eventual cost-effective deployment of emerging air vehicles. To fully assess the overall weapon system benefits requires evaluating the technology impacts to aircraft and weapon system effectiveness, survivability, reliability and affordability. What is needed is the ability to integrate simulations in a higher order model thus translating technology advances into war-fighter benefits. This R&D project will explore techniques to dramatically improve the ability to integrate vehicle assessments. Integration framework, modeling techniques and possibly fundamental methodologies will be explored. Phase 1 of the project will explore integration of the leading software currently used for aircraft evaluations. Existing models will be evaluated for their ability to perform the following functions: 1) Provide a higher level-modeling environment for the infrequent or less experienced users. 2) Modeling of normal behavior of subsystems and abnormalities that contain nonlinear and/or second-order effects. 3) Ability to evaluate weapons, long-loiter-time vehicles, energy storage systems, extremely small vehicles, and vehicles with no onboard liquids other than fuel.