Integration of a Tilt-Rotor Flight Simulation Platform

The main purpose of this thesis was to implement the real-time simulation model of the Bell Aircraft Corporation XV-15 aircraft to give a face to the mathematical model describing the flight mechanics of the tilt-rotor. The mathematical model has been developed thanks to several thesis works carried out at the Politecnico di Torino in collaboration with the ZHAW University located in Winterthur, Switzerland, and includes simplified mathematical models for the aerodynamics of the whole aircraft, rotors, and engine dynamics. The author's task was therefore to take the model in question and make it work with a graphic environment that reproduces the aircraft following the commands given by the pilot. The visualisation environment chosen is FlightGear, an open-source and cross-platform software that is widely used in research for its characteristics. The simulator is therefore made up of a portable workstation running the simulation model, written in MATLAB/Simulink® language, and a hardware input consisting of a USB flight stick and a pedal board. The hardware then communicates with the Simulink software, which evaluates the status of the aircraft, including position and attitude, but also including the rotational speed of the rotors, the position of the moving surfaces and the status of the landing gears, which are sent to the FlightGear environment, that reproduces an animated 3D version of the aircraft. The FlightGear simulation environment also has the task of reproducing a simplified view of the portion of planet Earth on which the aircraft is located, including aerial infrastructures but also vegetation and various obstacles. Fundamental work was then to synchronise the processor clock with that of the physical simulation to make the model truly real-time, thanks to the use of the Simulink® Desktop Real-Time™ library and special cares in the use of the software to speed up the simulation.