“When you’re in the early phase of the design process, you can very quickly and cheaply and easily build a 3D model that’s not only good enough to communicate your idea but good enough to do real engineering calculations with.”Ī tutorial video shows how, by clicking a few boxes and moving a few sliders, rough shapes can morph into aircraft designs. “I like to think of VSP as sort of a 3D version of a napkin,” says McDonald, who worked with Hahn and Moore on the software and now leads the development. Their solution, OpenVSP, or vehicle sketch pad, fits the bill. Hahn and Moore wanted to create something between CAD and having to restart the modeling process every time a change to the geometry or analysis method was made something that was “generic and had enough flexibility to where we could generate a whole bunch of different geometries for analysis, but not so complex that it was hard to use and you’d need a professional guy to do just that,” Hahn says. That was just kicking the can down the road.”

We wound up starting to do things like creating front-end interfaces for aircraft, but we quickly figured out we would need to have a different graphical interface for every single one of these things. “Their job was to do computational fluid dynamics or structures. But the people being asked to create these meta-geometries weren’t specialists in this area, says Hahn. Previously, all design analysis capabilities relied on building analysis-specific geometries that were distillations from the fully defined master that had to be recreated and tweaked if any one input was modified. Gloudemans, professor at CalPoly San Luis Obispo Robert McDonald, conceptual aircraft designer Andrew Hahn, and Mark Moore, chief technologist for on-demand mobility, Hahn and Moore being at NASA’s Langley Research Center, have developed an open source program that allows anyone with a computer, from NASA to hobbyists to the aircraft industry, to try their hand at designing aircraft. Hobbyists and others were mostly left out, and even those who had access to CAD tools were limited in their ability to be creative, as some parameters of fuselage, airfoil, and engine concepts were difficult to represent and couldn’t be modified without extensive re-work. For years, the best, and maybe only, way to dream up a realistic new aircraft design was to use computer-aided design (CAD) software, an expensive and regimented class of programs accessible only to professional engineers or engineering students.

The old saying about the inability to build a better mousetrap could also apply to aircraft design tools.

Nasa airfoil design