When Mitsubishi Aircraft launched its Mitsubishi Regional Jet (recenpartly renamed “Spacejet”), it was a major boost for the Japanese aviation industry as it represented the first indigenous commercial aircraft of its kind. One of the challenges of MITAC was to validate its own engineering simulation model, used for the development and testing of several of the systems.
An area of simulation that has remained a “place art” is the modelling of the interaction between the tire and the ground surface. Tire dynamics, combined with the complex non-linear characteristics of a runway (varying from clean/dry to contaminated, cold, wet) can drastically influence the behaviour of the tires, and the vehicle. A hiatus in this particular area of knowledge led MITAC to IDT, in order to create a valid model of the aircraft ground-contact dynamics.
With experience in road-vehicle simulation and tire dynamics modelling, IDT collaborated with the Delft University of Technology Faculty of Aerospace Engineering and SIMONA to develop this model. MITAC was thereby able to connect this model with their engineering simulation of the flight vehicle. As a result, the engineering teams were able to rely on an accurate representation of the vehicle-ground interactions throughout the entire range of operating speeds of the Spacejet.