Analyses on Aerodynamic and Inertial Loads of an Airborne Pod of High Performance Fighter Jet

Abstract

A fighter performing a reconnaissance mission is equipped with a pod that drives optical/infrared sensors for acquiring and identifying target information on the lower part of the fuselage. Due to the nature of the reconnaissance mission, the fighter performs high speed evasive maneuvers, and the resulting load should be considered importantly for the development of the pod. This paper concerns a numerical investigation into the inertial and aerodynamic loads of the airborne pod of high performance aircrafts. For the aerodynamic load analysis, the pylon and pod shapes are added to the fighter 3D model, and the commercial software was used for static and dynamic analysis. Considering the practical mission conditions, the common/extreme conditions were established respectively in the static and dynamic situations of pods and the driving torque could be tripled under dynamic conditions. In the analysis of inertia load, a 3-DOF model considering roll and turning maneuvers was derived by the Lagrangian method, and then the numerical integration method was applied to the analysis. As a results, it was conformed that the inertia load was generally induced at a low level compared to the aerodynamic load, but depending on the unbalance mass condition of the pod, the inertia load cannot be negligible.