Structural modelling for helicopter simulation - or: making small problems even smaller

We present algorithmic and implementation aspects of our work on a software for helicopter simulation from a joint project with the DLR Institute for Flight Systems. In this talk we focus on the structural dynamics of (rigid) multibody systems and flexible beams. Both already represent small problems compared to, e.g., large scale CFD simulations (we have usually less than 100-1000 DOFs). However, several cases of application of the software require us to make these problems even smaller (we'll give a motivation for that in the talk!). We exploit C++ template-programming to obtain a modular software design and to still be able to obtain reasonable performance with small data: examples include effcient automatic differentiation as well as a fast 1D discontinuous Galerkin method. We discuss the underlying software design ideas and show results for the performance and accuracy of our approach.