Application of Special-Purpose Digital Computers to Rotorcraft Real-Time Simulation

摘要

A study was initiated to determine the suitability of using an array processor as a computational element in rotorcraft real-time simulation. It was necessary to determine whether the speed of such a processor would be great enough to accurately simulate complex rotorcraft. Since memory limits on such a computer are quite restrictive, only the rotor portion of the model could be array processor resident. The array processor proved fast enough to execute the rotor code in less than 5 msec. Thus, the course of investigation branched into a study of the validity of a multilooping scheme, in which the rotor would loop over its calculations a number of times while the remainder of the model cycled once on a host computer. To prove that such a method would realistically simulate rotorcraft, a FORTRAN program was constructed to emulate a typical host/array processor computing configuration. The multilooping of an expanded rotor model, which included appropriate kinematic equa¬tions, resulted in an accurate and stable simulation.