On the preparation of a flexible real-time aircraft model for a flight simulator

Before flight test campaigns are pursued, handling qualities analyses of new aircraft designs are typically performed by means of a pilot-in-the-loop full-flight simulator. This also includes the forthcoming generation of greener aircraft, for which environmental damages resulting from aircraft emissions is mitigated. However, this type of air-vehicle requires special treatment in flight dynamics modeling and simulation, due to the interactive coupling between rigid-body dynamics and aeroelasticity. The extended model simulations result in an expressive increase in computational costs, which makes real-time simulations of flexible aircraft a current challenge. Therefore, the work at hand discusses an approach to reduce the computational consumption required for simulating slightly flexible aircraft models, in order to be embedded into a flight simulator. The mean-axes formulation is used to represent the coupled relations between flight mechanics and flexibility effects. The incremental forces and moments expressions are then modified algebraic-wise to obtain an equivalent but computationally efficient formulation to those expressions.