A NOVEL TECHNIQUE & TIME EFFICIENT ALGORITHM TO ESTIMATE MISS DISTANCES IN SIMULATION OF STORE SEPARATION FROM FIGHTER AIRCRAFT

Abstract

This paper introduces a novel software tool for accurately estimating the miss distance of a store separating from an aircraft during flight. The tool is based on trajectory data from 6- Degrees of Freedom (6-DoF) coupled Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations. The minimum distance between the store and aircraft is usually computed during the post processing which involves processing millions of surface mesh points, a computationally intensive task. Traditional methods, which compute distances sequentially, can take over 32 hours per simulation. The proposed solution uses Python-based multiprocessing and vectorization techniques to parallelize the calculations, significantly reducing computation time to just 45 minutes. By optimizing resource utilization and employing advanced matrix operations, this tool computes at least 40 times faster, while maintaining the same accuracy. This breakthrough facilitates faster analysis of store separation simulations and has significant implications in project workflow.1