Click here to return to GARDN procedures page

Re-format Tripan surface mesh file

  1. Open surface mesh file in Tecplot
  2. In Tecplot: File > Write Data File
  3. Zone/Geometry Format: Point
  4. Precision: 17
  5. Variables: X, Y, Z only; un-select mu and Cp
  6. Click OK to save surface mesh file with new format
    1. Save As wingSections.dat
  7. For a wing-body-tail surface mesh file inspect the wingSections.dat file to determine if the tail coordinates are listed before the wing coordinates or after. Note the order of surface coordinates as you will need to know this for the extractWingSections script


Run script to extract wing sections from surface mesh file


The script to extract sections from an MDO Tripan surface mesh file is here:

/nfs/kris/d1/people/howard/GARDN/scripts/extractWingSections

It's looking for a file containing the formatted Tripan surface mesh called wingSections.dat



It extracts a specified number of sections over a spanwise range and outputs to a file called 'wingSections_formatted.dat'

For the BCC wing geometry, I create a set of sections for each wing segment. The 'wingSections_formatted.dat' files are read by Hugo's script (executed from within GENAIR)

See an example here:

/nfs/kris/d1/people/howard/genair/play/BCC_geometry_flying_shape/

I Start up GENAIR an execute the following 'In' commands:

In [9]: run -i ../../datsToWings.py
Segment has (45, 121) points
Segment has (28, 121) points
Segment has (68, 121) points
Segment has (17, 121) points


In [11]: w0, w1, w2, w3 = wis

In [12]: draw(w0, w1, w2, w3)
Out[12]: <plot.figure.Figure at 0x522d490>

NOTE: The python script datsToWings.py is hard coded to work with only 3 wing segment files. It then extrapolates a winglet that has the same section as the last one in the nearest wing segment file.

At this point GENAIR has created a wing surface with 3 segments + a winglet.

Create a cap for the winglet tip

See here for commands to do this with GENAIR

Then fiddle around some more with GENAIR to get the flying wing shape positioned wrt to the fuse.

Output geometry in IGES file format


bcc_flying_wing_shape.igs