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Old 2nd Feb 2003, 15:16
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Mad (Flt) Scientist
 
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DustDevil, that's one hell of a complicated and computing intensive approach to the aerodynamic modelling issue.

Obviously it's working for you, but the normal approach is to model the aerodynamics of the whole aircraft, or at most the tail off and tail off aircraft, and use aerodynamic derivatives to capture the effect of roll rate, yaw rate, etc.

You could even use the kind of methodology you describe to determine the derivatives (although its normal to use flight matched data) but if you do the flow analysis/derivative determination first then you can skip that step for all subsequent similar events.

For example, if I want to make the roll damping behaviour correct, I can do as you do and calculate local angles of attack along the span, derive a lift distribution (although that's by no means a trivial exercise) and determine the rolling moment. But if I do that calculation for a matrix of possible values of alpha, beta, roll rate, etc, I should be able to derive a simple relationship between rolling moment and roll rate. It then makes sense to use that relationship in my simulation, rather than recalculate it every time step.

What are you using to determine the forces on, say, one of the sections of wing? Having determined local flow velocities, how are you coming up with the forces? To be honest, unless you are folding in some kind of CFD methodology - and how you keep the sim real-time by doing that I wouldn't know - then you just seem to be doing a lot of work for no significant increase in accuracy.

(By the way, my background is Stability and Control / Flight Simulation, so I'm used to simulations for training and for engineering design.)
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