Modeling of the Urban Gust Environment with Application toAutonomous Flight

摘要

Desirable surveillance applications of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) around urban areas provides mo-tivation for the investigation of turbulent wind generated by buildings which can potentially cause instability in aircraft flight. It has been shown that the urban canyons and single buildings which form the basic compo-nents of the urban geometry have classifiable flows with significant degrees of circulation and shear, a potential danger to light aircraft. A first generation methodology is proposed by which wind data important to flight planning in an urban environment is selected, accessed and applied. It is assumed the urban environment can be represented as a combination of discrete single buildings and canyons each easily amenable to com-putational fluid dynamics (CFD). A set of single buildings and canyons typical to the North American urban environment is selected to provide a set of wind data. A selection algorithm is proposed which will determine if the flow at a location in a given urban environment fits a member of the wind data set. Results from simulations for the Aerosonde UAV in a simple urban environment are presented and analyzed.