Large Eddy Simulation of Controlled Aircraft in Formation relying on Wake sensing
(2019) Annual Meeting of the American Physical Society’s Division of Fluid Dynamics (DFD) — Location: Seattle, WA, USA (23.November.2019)
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- Abstract
- Aircraft formation flight leads to substantial improvements in energetic efficiency even for large separations along the direction of flight. Maintaining an optimized energy-saving formation however requires the estimation of the preceding aircraft's wake position, which in turn implies a sensing strategy. For that purpose, we propose to leverage the measurements of the six degrees-of-freedom (6DOF) dynamics of the follower aircraft. This numerical study combines the simulation of the aircraft dynamics and the Large Eddy Simulation (LES) of the wakes by means of a Vortex Particle-Mesh (VPM) method. For both aircraft in a 2-ship formation, the aerodynamics and vorticity sources are modeled using an immersed lifting line approach. Crucially, the follower aircraft operates an autopilot in the form of a hierarchy of controllers that govern the ailerons, rudder, elevator and thrust in order to achieve wake sensing and tracking. The robustness of the autopilot is verified with the LES of a single aircraft in turbulent flow. Then the influence of a leader's wake on a follower's dynamics and wake is studied through the analysis of the related aerodynamic forces and the resulting compound wake. Finally, based on a simplified wake model and on an Ensemble Kalman Filter, the position of the leader's wake is estimated and used as the target of the autopilot in order to maintain the follower in the optimal position. The efficiency of this tracking procedure is here analysed. Importantly, the sensing of the leader's wake based on follower’s dynamics measurements solely shows promising results even for large separations.
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Ransquin, I., Caprace, D.-G., Chatelain, P., & et al. (2019). Large Eddy Simulation of Controlled Aircraft in Formation relying on Wake sensing. Annual Meeting of the American Physical Society’s Division of Fluid Dynamics (DFD), Seattle, WA, USA. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/170328