Wednesday, March 27, 2019

Engineering Sketch Pad


I haven't heard of Engineering Sketch Pad (source code as part of OpenMDAO, and here) before, but this is yet another NASA sponsored open source tool that could be useful to you for aircraft conceptual design. I read about it in a post on Another Fine Mesh about some interesting research the folks at Pointwise are doing. It reminds me of, but is different from, Open Vehicle Sketch Pad.

There's a seminar on the software given by one of the developers up on a NASA site: The Engineering Sketch Pad (ESP): Supporting Design Through Analysis. (yea, DARPA!)

It has some neat features that make it useful to support high-fidelity analysis. It creates watertight geometry, it can carry attributes with the geometry that could guide mesh resolution, it does "conservative" data transfer for discipline coupling (match a solver's numerical scheme), and most of its parts are differentiable which is useful for optimization.

I added this to my list of Open Source Aeronautical Engineering Tools.

2 comments:

  1. Here's the Glyph script the Pointwise folks used to do automated meshing starting from geometries in ESP: https://github.com/pointwise/GeomToMesh

    It relies on the geometry attribution to define things like viscous spacing, etc. that you need to get high-quality meshes.

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