Computational Analysis for Air/Ship Integration: 1st Year Report

This paper documents the accomplishments from the first year of a three-year Grand Challenge Project focusing on the application of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to predict coupled ship and aircraft aerodynamics. Unstructured chimera techniques were used to simulate the coupled ship and aircraft systems. Dynamic aircraft maneuvers were prescribed with the intention of building to simulations with an auto-pilot in- the-loop. All simulations were computed in a time- accurate fashion, due to the unsteady nature of the flow field, and used the commercial flow solver Cobalt. Analyses for both vertical shipboard landings of the Joint Strike Fighter and rotary-wing aircraft are discussed.