Application of Cart3D to Complex Propulsion-Airframe Integration with Vehicle Sketch Pad

Vehicle Sketch Pad (VSP) is an easy-to-use modeler utilized to generate aircraft geometries for use in conceptual design and analysis. It has been employed in the past to generate meta-geometries for aerodynamic analyses ranging from handbook methods to Navier-Stokes computational fluid dynamics (CFD). As desirable as it is to bring high order analyses, such as CFD, into the conceptual design process, this has been difficult and time consuming in practice due to the manual nature of both surface and volume grid generation. Over the last several years, VSP has had a major upgrade of its surface triangulation and export capability. This has enhanced its ability to work with Cart3D, an inviscid, three dimensional fluid flow toolset. The combination of VSP and Cart3D allows the performance of inviscid CFD on complex geometries with relatively high productivity. This paper will illustrate the use of VSP with Cart3D through an example case of a complex propulsionairframe integration (PAI) of an over-wing nacelle (OWN) airliner configuration.