Rotorcraft Countermeasure Release Simulation

This paper describes the continued development and validation of a multi-domain Eulerian/Lagrangian approach for modeling transient behavior of countermeasures released from tactical rotorcraft. The paper reviews the overall structure and background assumptions governing the model, includes recent correlations with public-domain chaff release data, and summarizes sensitivity studies to support real-time execution in flight simulation applications. The software is packaged as a Toolbox for operation in a MATLAB environment, though with modular elements – including industry-standard aerodynamic modeling - that can interact with other host software. The paper will describe some of the design tradeoffs in its realization, particularly as they impact features for manned flight simulation use. The ultimate goal of the analysis tool is to provide a variable level of fidelity that can trade off execution times with countermeasure response detail, so as to adjust the scope of the results to the auxiliary software that may interact with the simulation results.