Aerodynamic Analysis and Optimization
What is Aeolus ASP?
Aeolus ASP is a free aerodynamic design application for UAVs, drones, and light aircraft. It allows you to easily model arbitrary fixed-wing aircraft concepts and to optimize model parameters (such as wing shape, or flight condition) to meet your design requirements.
Aeolus ASP allows you to test innovative ideas, see the impact of design changes in almost real-time, explore the design space, and to optimize your design concept on your computer. It applies an innovative boundary element method designed for best-in-class computational speed and fidelity, which ultimately enables efficient screening and optimization of new aircraft design concepts.
Built-in Shape Optimization
A built-in optimization feature has been developed for Aeolus ASP taking advantage of the computational efficiency and the parametric design. With only a few clicks you can set-up your optimization problem and automatically search the design space for the best solution. Depending on your problem structure, you can choose between the BOBYQA algorithm, and the CMA-ES algorithm, respectively.
Key Features
Modeling
- Easy modeling of simple and complex aircraft
- Parametric wing design (no need for CAD)
- Unlimited number of wings and sections
- Unlimited number of propellers
- 3D visualization toolkit
- Expandable airfoil catalog with an initial set of more than 1000 airfoils and easy import of new airfoils
- Conventional and unconventional wings, planar and non-planar wings, such as boxwings, c-wings, paragliders etc.
- Blend radius feature for winglets and non-planar wings
- Nacelle feature
- Symmetric and asymmetric wings
- Propellers (compressor or turbine mode, single- or multi blade)
Analysis
- Near real-time analysis of model changes
- Solution for a given target flight condition
- 3d pressure distribution
- All global and local forces and moments
- Lift, induced drag, pitch
- Surface flow vectors
- Global and local aerodynamic coefficients
- Lift to drag analysis
- Polar analysis
- Angle-of-attack (AOA) scan
- Longitudinal stability analysis (pitch coefficient, center of pressure, and aerodynamic center/ neutral point)
- Required thrust and performance
- Innovative 3d panel method kernel for best-in-class computational speed and fidelity
- Multi-threading (OpenMP) enables analysis within seconds
Parameter Studies and Optimization
- Understanding the impact of model parameters using the Parameter Study Feature
- Optimization of arbitrary model parameters, including wing shape, flight condition, and discretization.
- Optimize for different objectives, including lift-to-drag, longitudinal stability, centre of gravity, aerodynamic center, and many more.
- A variety of constraints can be defined to make sure that the optimized design is feasible
- Advanced optimization algorithms for efficient design space exploration, including evolutionary, and gradient-based optimization.
Export
- Catia
- SolidWorks
- NX Unigraphics
- Nastran
- Ansys
- VTK/ Paraview
Easy Modeling, Fast Analysis, Advanced Optimization
The graphical user interface (GUI) provides a toolbox for pre- and post-processing. In preliminary design, the designer typically needs to modify the aircraft shape many times to explore the design space. Therefore, the aircraft model in Aeolus ASP is fully parametric and provides direct access to geometry parameters, making it very simple to apply changes and re-run analysis within seconds.
Post-processing features particularly include 3D surface pressure plots, surface flow vectors, flight mechanics properties, tabulated forces and performance indicators as well as plots of all major aerodynamic coefficients.