AeroSandbox 0.1.1

A Python 3 package for playing around with aerodynamics ideas related to vortex lattice methods, coupled viscous/inviscid methods, automatic differentiation for gradient computation, aircraft design optimization, and the like.

AeroSandbox

by Peter Sharpe (website)

Hosted at https://peterdsharpe.github.io/AeroSandbox/

Source code at: https://github.com/peterdsharpe/AeroSandbox/

About

AeroSandbox is a Python 3 package for playing around with aerodynamics ideas related to vortex lattice methods, coupled viscous/inviscid methods, automatic differentiation for gradient computation, aircraft design optimization, and the like.

Current Features

• User-friendly, concise, high-level, object-oriented structure for airplane geometry definition and analysis.
• Very fast vortex-lattice method flow solver ("VLM1") fully compatible with arbitrary combinations of lifting surfaces.

Vortex lattice results, colored by pressure difference and including streamlines:

Visualization of computational grid:

Purpose

The primary purpose for this repository is so the author can explore existing methods for aerodynamic analysis and develop new methods within a unified code base.

Future Goals

In descending order of priority/feasibility:

• (DONE) Finish implementing a traditional VLM (a la XFLR5's VLM1) for simulating multiple thin lifting surfaces.
• Implement a viscous drag buildup on wings from interpolated 2D XFOIL data (a la XFLR5's method for approximation of viscous drag).
• Perhaps implement a hybrid ring/horseshoe vortex VLM (a la XFLR5's VLM2) for simulating multiple thin lifting surfaces (hopefully with improved speed and robustness over the VLM1 approach).
• Implement a viscous drag buildup on nearly-axisymmetric bodies (using the method detailed in Drela's TASOPT v2.00 documentation, Appendix E)
• Perhaps consider implementing a free-wake compatible VLM model?
• Implement an inviscid 3D panel method for simulating multiple objects of arbitrary thickness.
• Make the aforementioned 3D panel method able to use triangular panels; add VTK or .stl compatibility for panel handling.
• Implement a 2.5D coupled viscous/inviscid method directly using the viscous methods described in Drela's paper "Viscous-Inviscid Analysis of Transonic and Low Reynolds Number Airfoils". Inviscid flow would be fully 3D, while viscous flow would make the assumption of negligible spanwise flow.
• Implement a fully 3D coupled viscous/inviscid method, compatible with triangular panels (a la Drela's IBL3 approach detailed in his paper "Three-Dimensional Integral Boundary Layer Formulation for General Configurations"). Ideally, the trailing edge stagnation points will be automatically identified, and nothing more than a surface triangulation along with freestream conditions will be required to compute forces and moments.

Usefulness

AeroSandbox attempts to improve over existing conceptual-level aerodynamics tools. The following strengths and weaknesses are identified with existing tools, based purely off the author's experience:

Strengths:

• XFLR5: Reliability, speed, accuracy, visualization
• AVL: Reliability, speed, accuracy, scriptability
• Tornado: Implementation in a high-level language
• VSPAero: Rapid CAD/geometry integration, geometric flexibility

Weaknesses:

• XFLR5: Lack of scriptability, limited geometric flexibility
• AVL: Single-precision (low gradient accuracy), bottlenecking due to I/O
• Tornado: Speed, user-friendliness
• VSPAero: Robustness, speed, accuracy, and reliability

With any luck, the list of strengths and weaknesses here will help to drive AeroSandbox development to retain positive qualities and eliminate negative ones.

Specifically, the following desirable qualities (and associated quantitative metrics) have been identified:

• Fast (for point analysis, VLM1 should yield a solution (CL, CDi) within 5% of the "Richardson-extrapolated" solution in less than 1 second for the ExampleAirplanes.conventional() airplane on a typical desktop computer)
• Accurate (in the limit of high panel density, the solution (CL, CDi) given by VLM1 must match AVL or XFLR5 to within 1%)
• Reliable/Robust (gradients of the outputs w.r.t. inputs are always finite and sensible - specifically, this implies that all vortex kernels must be artificially made to have no singularities)
• User-friendly (a GUI will be created)
• Scriptable (the code will be object-oriented; the GUI will contain a CLI)
• Readable (every class and function will be documented; code will be PEP-8-compatible where reasonable)
• Optimizer-friendly (design gradients and stability derivatives will be computed through automatic differentiation - perhaps with the autograd library?)
• Visualization (visualization will be provided through an OpenGL-compatible library - perhaps PyVista?)

License

MIT License

Copyright (c) 2019 Peter Sharpe

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

Contributing, Forking, Branching, and Versioning

Thanks for your interest in helping with the development of AeroSandbox - contributions are always so welcome!

If you have a change you'd like to make, the easiest way to do that is by submitting a pull request. However, please let me know before you do this (pds at mit dot edu), because:

Right now, branching is basically nonexistent. This is because there's currently only one contributor - me. As soon as this changes, we'll need to implement proper versioning.

If you've made several additions and would like to be involved in a more long-term capacity, please message me at (pds at mit dot edu) and we can add you as a collaborator here on Github!