Separation Dynamics of Air-to-Air Missile and Validation with Flight Data

Prediction of flight characteristics of a store in the vicinity of an aircraft is vitally important for ensuring the safety of the aircraft and effectiveness of the store to meet the mission objective. Separation dynamics of an agile air-to-air-Missile from a fighter aircraft is numerically simulated using an integrated store separation dynamics suite. Chimera cloud of points along with a grid-free Euler solver is used to obtain aerodynamic force on the missile and the force is integrated using a rigid body dynamics code to obtain the missile position. In the present work, the suite is applied to a flight test case and sensitivity of trajectory variables on launch parameters is studied. Further, the results of the suite are compared with the flight data. The predicted body rates and Euler angles of missile compare well with the flight data.