A Modeling and Simulation Tool for Safe Store Separation Envelope Generation using Monte Carlo Simulations

摘要

When an air released store is developed or undergoes substantial updates, integration to aircraft is realized through a certification process. One of the most important steps of the certification process is to determine safe separation envelope. For this process there are several approaches: full scale flight tests, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation techniques and wind tunnel captive trajectory tests. Separation tests applied with flight tests is not only very costly, but it also contains high risks for the aircraft and the pilot. CFD solutions became popular as the computational power becomes achievable in recent years, however most of the time it is not considered as accurate and fast enough to be used for entire safe separation envelope. Most popular store separation analysis method is wind tunnel tests, which may provide accurate and flexible store separation analysis with a carefully designed test plan. The aim of this study is to develop a store separation modeling and simulation tool that will allow achieving the safe separation envelope of a store by performing Monte Carlo simulations to include uncertainties at initial conditions and at physical properties of the store. The new tool is based on six degree of freedom (6DOF) simulation tool based on freestream flight parameters and flow parameters at the vicinity of the aircraft flow field measured at the wind tunnel. This tool is verified with the results of the wind tunnel trajectory measured by Captive Trajectory System (CTS) at the same wind tunnel. The described system allows modeling, simulation and visualization of the store separation by customization of the store and motion parameters and integrates different stages of pre and post processing. Then the flight simulations are extended using Monte Carlo Method to improve confidence on the separation analysis at the actual flight conditions.