The Department of Aerospace Engineering at Khalifa University, Abu Dhabi, UAE, has just taken delivery of Merlin Flight Simulation Group's Merlin MP521 Academic Engineering Flight Simulator, which will be used for undergraduate, postgraduate work, and research.

The Khalifa University MP521 is the first of its kind in the region and embodies the latest versions of Merlin’s applications for the academic environment.

Included in the applications is Merlin’s flexible flight software, Excalibur III, which is a fully non-linear transonic realtime 6 degrees of freedom flight mechanics application enabling representative simulation of a wide range of airvehicles from gliders to rockets, fixed wing and fixed wing VTOL to multirotor rotary wing and tilt rotor.

Excaibur III is supported by various other applications to complete the flight simulation environment: Diamond Visionics Corporation’s latest Genesis RTX visual display; an E2M electric six degree of freedom motion system; Merlin GLStudio based Instructor Operator system; and other supporting applications for instruments, avionics, and subsystems interactive touch screen displays.

Additionally the simulator uses Merlin’s Sfunction driver interface, which provides a link to the Khalifa University linear Matlab/Simulink software, such that students/researchers may develop control systems to interact with Excalibur III.

Students/researchers have the added benefit of being able to prepare Excalibur III model data sets offline for the simulator in preparation for loading onto the realtime system for testing, then saving off the model file at the end of a flight test session along with flight test datalogs for analysis offline from the simulator.

The MP521 provides Khalifa University with laboratory equipment enabling it to progress paper designs through realtime simulation to perform flight test analysis on novel design concepts.