Accelerated determination of UAV flight envelopes

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) system integration with naval vessels is currently realized in limited form. The operational envelopes of these vehicles are constricted due to the complexities involved with at-sea flight testing. Furthermore, the unsteady nature of ship airwakes and the use of automated UAV control software necessitates that these tests be extremely conservative in nature. Modeling and simulation are natural alternatives to flight testing; however, a fully-coupled computational fluid dynamics (CFD) solution requires many thousands of CPU hours. We therefore seek to decrease simulation time by accelerating the underlying computations using state-of-the-art, commodity hardware. In this paper we present the progress of our proposed solution, harnessing the computational power of high-end commodity graphics processing units (GPUs) to create an accelerated Euler equations solver on unstructured hexahedral grids.