Multibody Simulation of the Free-Flying Elastic Aircraft

Abstract

Multibody simulation is a widely used software tool to simulate the dynamic behavior of an aircraft during maneuvers, landing impacts and other highly dynamic sequences. To enable a realistic assessment, computational fluid dynamics, computational structural dynamics and flight mechanics have to be applied simultaneously. The multibody environment serves as a “virtual testbench” to investigate the overall system, or major components, in their interdisciplinary interaction. This work presents a multibody simulation-based analysis and simulation framework to study the free-flying maneuvering elastic aircraft, concentrating on the underlying problem of adequate representation of aerodynamics in a hybrid multibody system. Three interface levels coupling aerodynamic analysis and multibody simulation are described and illustrated by an application example.