UltraFLoads - A Framework For High-Fidelity Loads Computations

Abstract

High-fidelity simulations play a key role for aircraft design, virtual flight testing and simulation based certification. As computational resources increase and numerical methods progress, highly detailed geometries can be investigated and complex multi-physics models can be applied. Research projects of the past decades have demonstrated the capabilities towards virtual design and virtual testing of aircraft. To channel the experience and software developments from the past years, a new software framework for high-fidelity, multidisciplinary analyses with a focus on loads computation has been developed. The backbone is the FlowSimulator and FSDataManager (FSDM) jointly developed by DLR, Airbus and ONERA. The FSDM provides a comprehensive HPC library for the management of multiple parallel processes and data objects. This work focuses on the architecture of the new loads analysis software, which features a base class for all analyses, a centralized data model and a registry to inject user-defined scenarios. The capabilities are demonstrated by comparing a steady turn maneuver of a free-flying, fully elastic transport aircraft to real flight test data, showing good agreement for the resulting displacements.