Modelling and Simulation

Real-Time CFD in the simulation of Aerial Firefighting

Aerial firefighting has been at the forefront of combating wildfires as the range, speed and payload capacity of the aircraft, coupled with their ability to access remote locations, allow firefighters to rapidly respond to active fires. With recent years seeing an increase in the frequency and intensity of wildfires, there is a need for the development of safer and more effective firefighting techniques and platforms. 

This project aims to develop a physics-based total systems aerial firefighting simulation environment by coupling real-time computational fluid dynamics (CFD) methods with flight simulation models.  

The real-time CFD methods to be used in the project include: a Lattice Boltzmann Method (LBM) solver for the atmospheric model and a Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) solver for the water/ fire-retardant model. The simulation structure, with the interactions between the components, is shown below

 

Candidate aircraft models to be built and incorporated into the simulation include: 

S-70 FireHawk 
Bell 412 
CL-215 Water Bomber

This project employs a distributed computing system to avoid pooling high workloads on a single device. An overview of the system, showing the compute nodes, the included simulation components in each node and the communication data path between them, is shown below

Physical testing and evaluation of the simulation system will be done with the Daedalus 1 flight simulator. An overview of the major simulator components is shown below

Results

 

 

 

Performance