Rapid Airplane Parametric Input Design (RAPID)

An efficient methogology is presented for defining a class of airplane configurations. Inclusive in this definition are surface grids, volume grids, and grid sensitivity. A small set of design parameters and grid control parameters the process. The general airplane configuration has wing, fuselage, vertical tail, horizontal tail, and cannard components. The wing, tail, and canard components are manifested by solving a fourth-order partial differential equation subject to Dirichlet and Neumann boundary conditions, and the solution is expressed as a Fourier Series. The fuselage has circular cross section, and the radius is an algebraic function of four design parameters and an independent computational variable. Volume grids are obtained through an application of the Control Point Form method. Grid Sensivity is obtained by applying the automatic differentiation precompiler ADIFOR to software for the grid generation. The computed surface grids, volume grids, and grid sensivity are suitable for a wide range of Computational Fluid Dynamics simulation and configuration optimization.