Efforts Toward a Piecewise Reduced-Order Model for Unsteady, Complex Ship Airwakes

The complex and turbulent ship airwakes make shipboard rotorcraft launch and recovery difficult for even the most seasoned pilots. One of the main challenges to using flight simulation to train pilots is the real-time accurate prediction of the ship airwake. A real-time, accurate methodology that is able to operate on personal computers without computational meshing is being developed for Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) applications. The early success of this novel approach indicates that it may be well-suited to meet the challenge of dynamic interface (DI) applications as well. To explore this, a novel reduced-order model (ROM) to represent unsteady airwakes for shipboard operations is underway. This ROM will be integrated into an ocean-based representative environment model (REM) to close the gap in real-time simulations without significant computational investment. The ROM effort presented here specifically investigates which superstructure wake characteristics are dominant in different regions where flight operations are conducted. Canonical ship geometries that have been significantly studied experimentally and computationally provide the substantiation of this approach. Evaluation of the accuracy of the approach is presented, correlated with Lattice-Boltzmann simulations, theoretical and experimental data.