The Queen Elizabeth Class Aircraft Carriers: Airwake Modelling and Validation for ASTOVL Flight Simulation

摘要

This paper outlines progress towards the development of a high-fidelity piloted flight simulation environment for the UK’s Queen Elizabeth Class (QEC) aircraft carriers which are currently under construction. It is intended that flight simulation will be used to de-risk the clearance of the F-35B Lightning-II to the ship, helping to identify potential wind-speeds/directions requiring high pilot workload or control margin limitations prior to First of Class Flight Trials. Simulated helicopter launch & recovery trials are also planned for the future. The paper details the work that has been undertaken at the University of Liverpool to support this activity, and which draws upon Liverpool’s considerable research experience into simulated launch and recovery of maritime helicopters to single-spot combat ships. Predicting the unsteady air flow over and around the QEC is essential for the simulation environment; the very large and complex flow field has been modelled using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and will be incorporated into the flight simulators at the University of Liverpool and BAE Systems Warton for use in future piloted simulation trials. The challenges faced when developing airwake models for such a large ship are presented together with details of the experimental setup being prepared to validate the CFD predictions. Finally, the paper describes experimental results produced to date for CFD validation purposes and looks ahead to the piloted simulation trials of aircraft launch and recovery operations to the carrier.