The SAMAHE® helicopter handling system can transfer a 10-ton helicopter between the hangar and flight deck of a navy ship in less than two minutes. Designed by DCNS, a French naval defense and energy company, the SAMAHE® system operates safely up to sea state 6 (waves up to 6 meters high) and can be configured for use on a variety of ships, from corvettes to frigates. Nine navies worldwide are using the SAMAHE® system.
DCNS used Simulink® and Simscape Multibody™ to develop SiMAéro (Simulation de Manutention d’Aéronef apponté), a simulator that performs computational analysis for naval aircraft handling systems. SiMAéro simulates how SAMAHE® will operate under a wide range of conditions, including many that would be impractical or unsafe to test on a real ship.
“By modeling the SAMAHE® system with Simulink and Simscape Multibody, we minimized its qualification time and reduced at-sea testing, which lowered costs and increased ship availability,” says Jérôme Vouillat, simulation engineer at DCNS. “We worked with MathWorks Consulting Services to run the simulations on our computer cluster with MATLAB Parallel Server, and accelerated hundreds of simulation runs.”