Multi-Fidelity Simulation of Cargo Airdrop: From the Cargo Bay to the Ground

Abstract

Future military transport aircraft (FMTA) have to cope with the increasing demands in tactical and strategic airlift. Within the DLR-internal project MiTraPor II simulation and assessment tools have been developed that can be used as a virtual test bed for the evaluation and optimization of new technologies and procedures applied to military transport aircraft. This paper gives an overview over the three different approaches that have been developed for the simulation of cargo airdrop, namely a flight dynamical simulation of the entire airdrop sequence, a high-fidelity CFD-simulation accounting for air-flow influence in the near field of the aircraft, and a multi-body simulation for the evaluation of the impact on the payload during landing.