Parametric Identification of Surface Regions in OpenVSP for Improved Engineering Analysis

In this paper we present a method for parametrically identifying regions of interest on surfaces, and the implementation of this method in Vehicle Sketch Pad. We also show three different example applications for this new feature. The first application is identifying regions of a geometry as solar cells in order to analyze the equivalent solar cell area at different elevations and azimuths of the sun. The second application is creating an engine in Vehicle Sketch Pad that allows for powered boundary conditions to be easily applied for a computational fluid dynamics solver. The final application explored is identifying a control surface on an airfoil and using Cart3D to compute the derivative of the sectional lift coefficient with respect to the control surface deflection.