21st Congress of International Council of the Aeronautical Sciences, Melbourne, Australia, 13-18 September, 1998
Paper ICAS-98-1.1.2

A DISTRIBUTED APPROACH TO THE DESIGN OF A REAL-TIME ENGINEERING FLIGHT SIMULATOR

Allerton D. J.
Cranfield University, United Kingdom

Keywords: flight simulator design

Engineering simulators are used in the design and evaluation of aircraft systems. This paper describes the design of an engineering simulator based on commercial off-the-shelf equipment. An array of PCs, coupled via Ethernet cards, is used to sustain an update rate of 50 Hz for all the primary elements of a real-time simulation. The paper describes the organisation of the simulator software to provide a rapid prototyping environment for the design of flight control laws, aircraft displays and avionics systems. The aircraft displays are based on standard SVGA cards and the methods to provide realistic aircraft displays for primary flight instruments, engine instruments and navigation. Displays are outlined. Data is recorded and displayed at 50 frames per second, generating 1.5 M bytes of data per minute which can be analysed on-line or saved for subsequent off-line analysis. The paper describes a method to acquire and record essential flight data using the XMS memory of a PC. The papers includes examples of real-time aircraft displays and aircraft responses for several aircraft to illustrate the effectiveness of this approach to engineering simulation. The paper concludes with a summary of the overall performance of the simulator in meeting an overall real-time iteration rate of 50 Hz for flight models and aircraft displays.

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