Global Crown Modular Helicopter Flight Dynamics

In recent years, innovative helicopters and rotorcrafts configurations are being developed over the world. We can see 3 important focus of research: (1) improving the speed and range of rotorcrafts, (2) hybrid rotorcraft and ground vehicles concepts (3) Autonomous systems. While helicopter flight dynamics is a well-established field, many tools developed are based on the traditional main rotor/tail rotor arrangement. These tools are based typically on Fortran/C/C++ and modifications of these mature tools can be difficult.

Based on a multi-body Modelica model, we introduce in this paper a library that can cover flight dynamics analysis for various rotorcraft configurations, in a modular way, taking advantage of various already available models. An example of the classical Black Hawk UH-60 is shown. We introduce also how a Joystick can be interfaced directly to a SimulationX and run an interactive real-time simulation, in a “pilot-in-the-loop” manner.