Performance Improvements in Real-Time General-Purpose Multibody Virtual Experiment on Rotorcraft Systems

This work presents the application of a general purpose multibody analysis software to the real-time simulation of realistic rotorcraft systems. The objective is to show how the same class of general-purpose simulation tools that are currently used for rotorcraft analysis and design could be used to simulate also the same type of problems in real-time, thus broadening their application to fields like realistic flight simulation, virtual wind-tunnel testing, pilot-in-the-loop rotorcraft design, and realistic rotorcraft-pilot coupling investigation. The issues and the limitations arising from the real-time requirements are illustrated using already existing multibody models of full-scale helicopters and tiltrotor wind tunnel models, so to highlight the possibility to share model components already available during the analysis phase of a rotorcraft design. The entire system runs on PC-class, off-the-shelf hardware and is entirely based on free software.