ZONA's business plan for NL-DFS will follow ZONA's flagship software, called: ZAERO, product/service sales strategy. The added capabilities developed in NL-DFS will strengthen ZONA's market position in the aerospace industry. NL-DFS will be marketed towards flight test applications on a wide class of aerospace vehicles such as: (a) USAF's F-22 and F-35 aircrafts at Edwards AFB, (b) UASF's Hilda, sensorcraft as well as stealth and morphing UAV/UCAV, (c) DARPA's Morphing Aerostructure (MAS), (d) Boeing 7E7 and future executive jet designs of Cessna, Raytheon, etc. The proposed NL-DFS can also be applied to validate health management strategies specifically designed for aircraft designs with prominent aeroelastic characteristics. A flight dynamics simulation capability with an added-on nonlinear aeroelastic solver is still not available. NASA has been working for many years towards achieving a software package that would accurately predict the interaction between flight dynamics considering airframe structural flexibility in closed-loop with flight control laws. The proposed NL-DFS is aimed at providing an expedient multidisciplinary nonlinear flight simulation tool to perform an efficient flaw debugging for advanced control laws as well as to promote physical understanding of the in-flight observed dynamic behaviors due to evolutionary designs. It also will assist in the prediction of the instabilities onset prior to envelop expansion programs. NL-DFS will be especially valuable during NASA's current and next generation flying quantities and envelope expansion programs.
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