This paper describes the current status of our research on the development of a program that allows users to easily generate surface panels for fast aerodynamic analysis which can be used in the conceptual design phase of aircraft development. It take...
This paper describes the current status of our research on the development of a program that allows users to easily generate surface panels for fast aerodynamic analysis which can be used in the conceptual design phase of aircraft development. It takes advantage of the CATIA program for defining the shape of the aircraft, and the shape modeling module has been developed to produce aircraft model in the STL format files, and the paneling module produces a grid of the surface panels along the STL surface data. The resultant panel data are plugged into a commercial analysis code(e.g. USAERO program) for the fast and iterative flow calculation. The current approach can reduce the cost in terms of time and labor required in the earlier stage of aircraft development.