Events

An Engineering Flight simulator in a University

Date: Thursday 19 September 2019 13:30 - 14:30

Location: Engineering 2.16, QMUL

Abstract.
Flight simulators are used in major aerospace companies in the design, development and testing of new aircraft and their systems, rather than the training of pilots. These Engineering Flight Simulators enable engineers to experiment with new designs in a synthetic environment and provide a powerful tool to validate designs. The talk will outline the design of a real-time engineering flight simulator, based on a distributed architecture, which has been used on flight simulators at the University of Sheffield and Cranfield University to support the teaching of modern aircraft design, particularly flight dynamics and avionics, and to support research projects involving piloted studies. The talk will cover the use of open software, real-time network protocols, a distributed architecture, data acquisition, aerodynamic models, aircraft displays, navigation sensors, image generation and flight data recording in an advanced engineering flight simulator. The talk will also cover integration of Matlab modules, off-line simulation to develop flight control laws for novel aircraft configurations and application to human factors studies. The talk will conclude with a brief review of recent research projects including synthetic vision, wake vortex modelling, future air-traffic-management networks and optimisation of ground movements at busy international airports.  

Bio-sketch: Prof Dave Allerton held the Chair in Avionics at Cranfield University and Computer Systems Engineering at the University of Sheffield, where he is currently an Emeritus Professor. He was responsible for establishing a flight simulation centre at Cranfield University, following an HEFCE award of £780K. He is author of the book Principles of Flight Simulation, and has published extensively. Previous EPSRC grants include synthetic vision (GR/R43020/01), real-time modelling of wake vortices5 (GR/R84047/01) and massively parallel architectures (EP/G015775/1). He participated in the Boeing Smart Skies programme in future air traffic management systems 2007-2010. He is a Fellow of the IET and the RAeS and currently serves on the Council of the RAeS. Part of airline pilots for trial studies in TRANSIT will be sourced through his links with British Airways, Virgin, and the Flight Operations Group in the RAeS.