Research On Dynamic Characteristic Of Hose-drogue System In Aerial Refueling

Aerial refueling plays an important role in the military fields. As one of the foundation for the whole autonomous aerial refueling research, this article presents a numerical model which use flow field search algorithm to simulate aerial refueling hose-drogue system dynamic motion.The numerical model consists of the following three aspects: for the tanker wake research part, the tanker external flow field is obtained by using a computational fluid dynamics method based on finite volume method to solve Reynolds averaged Navier-Stokes equations; for the paradrogue assembly aerodynamic analysis part, an aerodynamic drag model is established for a variable speed drogue; for the hose modeling part, the hose is discretized into a series of ball hinges linked by massless rigid rods which form a multi-body system, the governing equations are derived for the system and a variable hose segment is used to simulate the reel control of hose. In order to calculate the aerodynamic force acted on the hose and the drogue, a high-efficient neighbor-to-neighbor algorithm is used to search host cells of discrete dots of the hose-drogue in the flow field. Finally, the forces-constraint equations for the hose-drogue system are solved by using Thomas algorithm, the dynamics is advanced forward by a 4th-order Runge-Kutta time-stepping procedure.The numerical model is used to simulate hose-drogue system dynamics in multiple conditions, the results show a good correlation with previously reported flight-test data in the open literature and the use of neighbor-to-neighbor algorithm saves a lot of solving time. Results of this study have certain guiding significance for the drogue-probe aerial refueling.