Multi-Axis Maneuver Simulation for System Identification of Flexible Transport Aircraft by High-Fidelity Methods

The development, testing and production of new aircraft are associated with considerable temporal and financial risks due to the product and manufacturing complexity. In order to accelerate the introduction of innovative technologies for more economical, more environmentally friendly and safer air transport vehicles and to better control the technological risks involved, DLR's guiding concept The Virtual Product aims at virtualizing the design, development and manufacturing processes. The availability of high fidelity simulation tools with the capability to model multidisciplinary phenomena is a key factor in this context. High demands are put on the numerical methods and solvers as the tools must provide reliable results in a robust manner for the entire flight envelope where nonlinearities are prominent in most of the disciplines. In this paper we present an approach for the high-fidelity multi-axis maneuver simulation, the Virtual Flight Test, based on multidisciplinary analysis of the free-flying elastic aircraft with CFD in the time domain. The goal is to generate virtual flight test data of high accuracy to substitute time and cost consuming real flight test campaigns to identify the flight mechanic and aeroelastic characteristics of the aircraft. Wavelet-type control surface inputs with carefully selected frequency ranges and amplitudes are used to excite the aircraft. A medium-range jet transport serves as the test case for which the approaches as well as the results of two identification maneuvers are presented and discussed