User guide

What is AeroFrame?

Computational aeroelastic analyses are often based on separate solvers for the aerodynamics and the structural analyses. In other words, aerodynamics may be analysed with a standalone CFD tool and the structural response is computed with a standalone FEM tool. To perform an aeroelastic analyses it is necessary to exchange data, namely loads computed by the CFD tool and deformations computed by the FEM tool.

AeroFrame is a framwork which facilitates the exchange of load and deformation data, and it coordinates the separate aerodynamics and structure solvers. AeroFrame performs a “high-level partitioned aeroelastic analyses”. The actual aerodynamics and structure solvers have to be plugged into the framework. This is done using small wrapper modules, one for the CFD tool and one for the FEM tool. In order to use AeroFrame it is only necessary to write two wrapper modules.

The following diagram illustrates the coupling, and a so-called aeroelastic loop which is solved to perform a static aeroelastic analysis. In this case, the CFD tool is PyTornado and the structure tool is FramAT (see also Related projects), though both tools are representatives of any arbitrary CFD or structure tool.

Fig. 2 Conceptual implementation of the aeroelastic loop to find static equilibria [Dett19]

The following pages describe the tool prerequisites, how the wrappers can be set up and how AeroFrame is used.