Time-Accurate Ship Airwake and Unsteady Aerodynamic Loads Modeling for Maritime Helicopter Simulation

摘要

This paper describes a simulation study to investigate helicopter pilot workload in near-ship operations, resulting from the airwake of a generic frigate shape. Unsteady airwakes have been modeled using time-accurate computational fluid dynamics and integrated into a piloted flight simulator where the effects of deck motion on pilot workload could also be studied. In addition, an alternative method of modeling the time-varying loads on the aircraft arising from unsteady airwake, using wind tunnel data, has also been investigated. The results show that airwake unsteadiness leads to increased pilot control activity in the simulator for wind directions, which are known to cause excessive workload during real deck-landing operations. In the simulator, a reasonable correlation was found between pilot control activity and subjective workload ratings. The alternative fuselage loads model resulted in lower predicted pilot workload than the precomputed time-accurate airwake models, for wind directions other than bow winds.