Improving Design Software for Aircraft Wings

2-26-98
University Park, Pa. --- Undergraduate students in aerodynamics at Penn State now get to wing it more often. Thanks to an aerospace engineering graduate student, designing aircraft wings are just a mouse click away.

Daniel P. Baker, a graduate student originally from Collegeville, Pa., is currently pursuing his master's degree in aerospace engineering. As an undergraduate in the University Scholars program, Baker combined his engineering and computer skills to make wing design fun while completing his honors thesis.

Under the guidance of his adviser, Dr. George Dulikravich, an associate professor of aerospace engineering, and with funding from a NASA Langley graduate research fellowship facilitated by Dr. John Malone, Baker improved existing design software to give students the opportunity to design their own wings.

Baker's software program, called Aerodynamic Inverse Design 2D (AID2D), is an extension of a design software package that was originally developed by Norman Foster, a 1995 graduate with a master's degree in aerospace engineering and one of Dulikravich's students. The aerodynamic inverse shape design software runs on IBM personal computers and allows for on-screen drag-and-drop mouse controlled commands.

Currently, students are using AID2D to design airfoil models, two-dimensional representations of wings, as a part of their aerodynamics classes in aerospace and mechanical engineering and in engineering science and mechanics.

"The class focuses on designing airfoils and testing them in given conditions, without ever building the actual airfoil," says Baker, "A typical aerodynamics problem asks the students to design an airfoil model that will have desired surface pressure distribution when used under the given set of flight conditions."

Before this software was developed, the student designer was unable to change the data during the design or to ever see the design.

"Previous airfoil design software was difficult to use because it requires large amounts of data about the airfoil and does not display the shape of the airfoil," says Baker, "The designer had to trust that the numerical answer would produce the correct airfoil design."

Another problem in the past is that the surface pressure on a wing is found from a given airfoil shape, but the appropriate airfoil shape cannot be found easily that produces desired surface pressure distribution.

Baker's software solves these problems because students now using the graphically interactive AID2D can draw an airfoil shape using the mouse and modify the design by clicking and dragging on the drawing. The computer program then uses high-speed mathematical calculations to figure out the amount of surface pressure acting on the wing, modifies the wing shape iteratively, and displays this information and the airfoil shape on the screen.

Dulikravich and Baker hope to see applications of the AID2D program not only for airplane design, but also for advances in military and space aircraft.

Baker presented his paper, "A Graphically Interactive Design Environment for Multi-Component Airfoils," at the 36th Aerospace Sciences Meeting and Exhibit on Jan. 12-15 in Reno, Nev. With the same paper, he won the regional AIAA Student Paper Competition last year.

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Contacts:
Barbara Hale (814) 865-9481 (office) (814) 238-0997 (home) bah@psu.edu
Vicki Fong (814) 865-9481 (office) (814) 238-1221 (home) vyf1@psu.edu