Progress Towards Modeling Ship/Aircraft Dynamic Interface

Previous efforts, for which high performance computing modernization program (HPCMP) computer time was utilized, employed state-of-the-art computation fluid dynamics (CFD) methods to create time-accurate ship airwake models that are far beyond the rudimentary stochastic airwake models used previously. Realistic airwake models are required for realistic pilot workload and aircraft performance characteristics. The CFD airwake models were integrated with existing flight simulation models in a semi-coupled fashion such that the aircraft performance is affected by the presence of the ship airwake, but the airwake characteristics are not affected by the presence of the aircraft. This semi-coupled approach has worked relatively well for applications such as ship design comparisons for first-order airwake effects on aircraft operations. However, the lack of coupling between the ship and aircraft has limited the usefulness of flight simulations for applications such as flight envelope development and aircraft test and evaluation. This paper examines the initial steps taken through the HPCMP Grand Challenge program to model the coupled ship and aircraft system