A DEMONSTRATION HYBRID COMPUTER FOR REAL-TIME FLIGHT SIMULATION

Abstract

A hybrid, real-time simulation facility has been designed, constructed, and demonstrated, using as a test vehicle the complete aerodynamic and engine equations for a high performance military aircraft. The analog-digital configuration employs peripheral analog equipment to represent a linear, skeleton version of the aircraft and the PDP-1 digital computer to carry out engine simulation, decision management, and corrections for nonlinear effects. To provide an all-digital reference against which the hybrid simulation could be compared, the aircraft model, which in general scope is identical to the F-100A model used in the UDOFT studies, was also simulated on the PDP-1 alone. It was found that the solution rate of 20 per second employed in the all-digital study could be reduced to one per second without deleterious effects when the hybrid configuration was used. Such a reduction demonstrates that supplementing a digital computer by relatively inexpensive analog peripheral equipment in the manner suggested substantially increases the real-time capacity of the digital computer in complex simulation applications. Moreover, because a number of key variables are computed continuously in the analog domain, the introduction of analog equipment results in a net decrease in the complexity of the interface, particularly in the number of analog storage devices required.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jun 01, 1965
Accession Number
AD0618706

Entities

People

  • Mark E. Connelly
  • Oleg Fedoroff

Organizations

  • Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Advanced Electronics
  • Air Platforms
  • Biomedical
  • Energy and Power Technologies
  • Space
  • Weapons Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Accuracy
  • Aircrafts
  • Airframes
  • Analog Computers
  • Analog Systems
  • Coding
  • Computer Programming
  • Control Surfaces
  • Converters
  • Decoding
  • Digital Computers
  • Electrical Engineering
  • Flight Simulators
  • Hybrid Computers
  • Reliability
  • Switching
  • Systems Engineering

Readers

  • Aerospace Engineering
  • Computer Engineering
  • Parallel and Distributed Computing.