Welcome to the occ_airconics documentation!

Transonic Airliner cover image

occ_airconics implements a scripted aircraft geometry package for Python, powered by Open CASCADE and PythonOCC.

While the majority of detailed aircraft design is performed by expert users of high-level Computer Aided Drawing (CAD) software, the bottom-up construction philosophy ‘aircraft geometry as computer code’ has recently amassed interest in vehicle concept design and multidisciplinary optimisation. Primary aims of occ_airconics are to provide one such implementation through generic aircraft primitives, such as the Airfoil, LiftingSurface, Engine and Fuselage classes, with a view that they will be used in configuration-level geometry parametrisation and optimisation. An example of this functionality lies in the built-in transonic airliner model, capable of producing a range of conventional geometries (see above) and a box-wing style aircraft.

One of the key advantages of occ_airconics is that it benefits from being built on the open-source full CAD kernel Open CASCADE available through PythonOCC, and therefore has access to an extensive and well-supported library of fast geometry manipulation tools including NURBS (Non-Uniform Rational B-Spline) curves and surfaces.

occ_airconics offers a fully cross platform and open source porting of core classes from the popular AirCONICS (A ircraft CON figuration through I ntegrated C rossdisciplinary S cripting) plug-in for Rhinoceros 3D. Users of the original AirCONICS software should be aware however that the functionality of the original API has changed in occ_airconics to fit with the environments and ideologies of CPython and pythonocc. In particular, the base classes AirconicsShape and AirconicsCollection are added (see API reference for details).

Installation of occ_airconics requires a recent version of PythonOCC, and is compatible with the latest version, 0.17, available from the conda package - see Installation for more information.

Refer to the examples and API reference for a demonstration of the usage of occ_airconics. Contributions are welcome, and developers should refer to the Open CASCADE and pythonocc API documentation for guidelines on manipulation of underlying geometry kernel.

Enjoy occ_airconics!

Contents:

Acknowledgements

occ_airconics began as fork of AirCONICS, and therefore large parts of the code, documentation, examples and manual are attributed to the AirCONICS developers. For more detail on AirCONICS, please refer to the accompanying reference book or recent papers:

[1] Sobester, A. and Forrester, A. I. J., Aircraft Aerodynamic Design: Geometry and Optimization, Wiley, 2014.

[2] Sobester, A., “Four Suggestions for Better Parametric Geometries,” 10th AIAA Multidisciplinary Design Optimization Conference, AIAA SciTech, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, jan 2014.

[3] Sobester, A., “Self-Designing Parametric Geometries,” 56th AIAA/ASCE/AH- S/ASC Structures, Structural Dynamics, and Materials Conference, AIAA SciTech, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, jan 2015.

Indices and tables