Overview of Sub.Project VitAM-Gust

Abstract

The development, testing and production of new aircraft are associated with considerable temporal and financial risks due to the product and manufacturing complexity. In order to accelerate the introduction of innovative technologies for more economical, more environmentally friendly and safer air vehicles and to better control the technological risks involved, DLR’s guiding concept The Virtual Product aims at virtualizing the design, development and manufacturing processes, including the definition of an appropriate validation strategy. The availability of high-fidelity simulation tools with the capability to model multidisciplinary phenomena are a decisive part in that context. High demands are put on the numerical methods and solvers as the tools must provide reliable results in a robust manner for the entire flight envelope where nonlinearities are prominent in most of the disciplines. A key technology is the ability to enable virtual flight testing based on high-fidelity simulation tools. The progress made within the national research project VitAM (Virtual Aircraft Model) by the German Aerospace Center (DLR) in the recent past regarding the development, validation and demonstration of methods and tools to perform virtual flight tests is presented in this paper and the following ones of this book chapter. The present paper gives an overview of the DLR sub-project VitAM-Gust, the development of some important ingredients and simulation strategies required for virtual flight testing, as well as the simulation framework FlowSimulator used for their integration. Verification and validation aspects for the multi-disciplinary components as well as for the overall framework are addressed. As use case for the demonstration, virtual flight tests are performed for a medium size transport aircraft. The aerodynamic data achieved is then input for the development of a gust load alleviation system (GLA). The effectiveness of the GLA is proven via virtual flight tests involving aircraft gust encounter