darklizard695 / aeroelasticipy

Python Aeroelastic Analysis Tool for 3D Wings

aeroelasticipy

This project is a re-edition of my Master Thesis, done back in 2013/2014. My MT covered the analysis of the 3D aeroelastic response of an UAV in a gust scenario.

This project was originally coded in Matlab. Now, I revisit the memory chest to migrate the code to Python 3.x, mainly because I was very curious about how could I improve the code performance, and also be able to share my results with the community.

I will first walk through the 3D steady VLM, 3D then unsteady VLM, and finally construct the free body motion equations calculating the aerodynamic forces with the VLM module.

• Steady 3D VLM demo

Milestones:

• The steady 3D Vortex Lattice Method module is ready and validated against the figures in Low Speed Aerodynamics (J. Katz et al.). Only minor further improvements will be made, related to controlling the access to some attributes and methods of the class. Now I can start working on the unsteady VLM.

Misc:

• Steady VLM: I have managed to suppress all the for loops in the influence matrix and rhs term construction (all the Biot-Savart law evaluations) relying on numpy broadcasting, cross and dot products with high order arrays (the latter by means of np.einsum), improving execution time around x150!, compared to using numpy with naive for loop constructions.