Development and test of an Iron Bird (Airplane wing simulator)

The thesis project develops an Iron Bird, a simulation of a wing of a regional airplane. The simulator is partially physical (half wing, sensors, actuators) and partially virtual (second half wing). The project is part of the AstIb Clean Sky2 (CS2) European project. The ASTIB (development of Advanced Systems Technologies and hardware/software for the flight simulator and Iron Bird demonstrators for regional aircraft) project brings together 7 European companies and academic partners led by LEONARDO. It aims at supporting the improvement of the Technological Readiness Level for a significant number of equipments that are being considered of critical importance for the future Green Regional Aircraft (GRA). The design and production of the Iron Bird is responsibility of CERTIA. The Iron Bird is the ground test bench allowing the integration of the different aircraft systems. This Iron Bird is equipped with new innovations (semi-virtual, innovative loading systems, health monitoring, etc.). The thesis work is about receiving the models (developed by aeronautical engineers), deploying them on the computers, testing and improving them until complete validation. The simulation of the wing during a flight requires several computers: FMSC (Flight Mechanics Simulation Computer) to simulate the flight dynamics; FCC (Flight Control Computer) to control the airplane during the flight, HMS (Health Management System for reactive and proactive maintenance. The computers rely on various MatLab Simulink models. The workflow follows the principles of the Model-based software design, that is based on the development of a model of the plant and the controller with focusing on the details that are useful to understand system’s behaviour. A significant advantage of following that approach is the automated code generation, which allows to automatically translate the Simulink model into code that can be executed on a dedicated hardware. In a first phase models are tested in a simulation environment. Then they have to be executed in real time to verify the interactions between the models and the shared memory. Executing a model in real time requires the usage of high-performance platforms. The chosen one is NI VeriStand, a software designed also for Hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) and Software-in-the-loop (SIL) simulations. In order to import the model in NI VeriStand we need a dll (dynamic linking library) file. It is obtained as result of code generation. The models received from the partners are modified to make them suitable for code generation. This means substituting every source block with an Input Port and every sink block with an Output Port. Then code is generated and the model, translated into a dll, is ported to NI VeriStand. Next step is, exploiting VeriStand, to map inputs and outputs on the reflective memory. In this way the 3 models composing the project shall be able to interact with each other. Last step is, indeed, to verify their interactions.