New approaches in CPACS-based preliminary design of aircraft fuselage structures using Python

Abstract

Combining the expertise of many institutes, an increasingly sophisticated interdisciplinary aircraft design process is being developed at DLR, using the CPACS data format (Nagel et al., 2012; Scherer and Kohlgrüber, 2014) as a means of exchanging results. Within this process, TRAFUMO (Scherer et al., 2013) (Transport Aircraft Fuselage Model), developed at the Institute of Structures and Design (DLR-BT), is currently the established tool for automatic generation and subsequent sizing of global finite element fuselage models using Ansys and the Python programming language. Recent efforts to increase tool performance and to open up the modelling chain for a wider range of finite element solvers have led to a lot of functionality being shifted from specific routines in Ansys to Python. This includes the automatic creation of global finite element models based on geometric and structural data from CPACS and the conversion of models between different codes. Taking advantage of the modular and object-oriented nature of Python, each new module has been implemented independently with a well-defined central data format in place for storing and exchanging information, thus laying the groundwork for a new all-Python model generation chain, which provides more flexibility at significantly improved runtimes. In the presented paper, the overall structure of the newly developed model generation chain will be introduced. Additionally, the development status of several key modules, such as geometry processor, finite element generator and converter will be discussed in detail, with special attention paid to the interfaces between modules