REVOLUTIONARY, low-cost software designed to provide aerospace engineers with access to powerful simulation and visualisation tools has been unveiled by California-based Sight, Sound, & Motion.
Its FltMaster is offered as a complete engineering system, consisting of advanced application software hosted on a graphics workstation. It allows aircraft to be modeled and "flown" in a real-time environment, while data covering hundreds of parameters are collected for subsequent analysis.
The system can be used to investigate the likely flight characteristics of aircraft under development, and to analyse the resulting data for information such as the lift-versus-drag curve. The developers claim that data from the simulation achieve ±10% accuracy, compared with results from testing a model in a wind tunnel. Its "open-architecture" design means that data from other sources can be imported into the system.
The FltMaster software costs around $90,000 per workstation and is operated in the Microsoft Windows NT environment, running on a dual Intel 200MHz PentiumPro processor.
Sight, Sound, & Motion, president Stan Kranzler adds: "It's cheap enough to have small groups [of engineers] developing their component, yet it will 'fly' the whole aircraft."
Kranzler believes that other possible applications include, sales and marketing support, where the software can be used by suppliers, to demonstrate the effect a particular modification will have, on the performance of an aircraft.
Source: Flight International
