Free Aircraft Design Software for Aerodynamics, Stability and Structural Design
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This page shows a collection of free airplane design software to solve computations for Preliminary Aircraft Design, Wing & Aircraft Aerodynamics, Aircraft Stability and Aircraft Structures.
If you know of any free aircraft design software that would fit into any of these categories, please let me know by dropping me an email message.
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Airfoil Design
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XFoil
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XFOIL is an interactive program for the design and analysis of subsonic isolated single-segment airfoils. It was written at MIT by professor Mark Drela.
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JavaFoil
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Martin Hepperle's JavaFoil is a program that uses inviscid potential flow analysis as well as an Eppler-like boundary layer analysis to design and analyse airfoils. Designing multi-element wing sections is possible as well, but some restrictions apply, see the manual for that.
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Conceptual Aircraft Design
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XFLR5 Airfoil and Wing analysis tool
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XFLR5 uses XFOIL as its computation kernel and adds a graphical user interface for Windows operating systems. XFLR5 also offers a 3D wing design capability, using two different calculation schemes. Similar to MIAReX (described further down below) in this respect, it uses the built in XFOIL kernel to determine local wing section properties. Highly recommended!
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TORNADO Vortex Lattice Method
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A Vortex Lattice Method (VLM) implemented in MATLAB. The code is intended for linear aerodynamic wing design applications, in conceptual aircraft design or in aeronautical education. Among other things it can do such nice things as computing and displaying the Treffz plane velocity vector field. Known Cessna C-172 data was used to validate the code agains other codes such as AVL, VIRGIT and CMARC.
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MIAReX
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A calculation method for Xfoil and multi-airfoil wings, based on formulae developed by James C. Sivells & Robert H. Neely in NACA TN-1269 (1947). Basically it takes 2D wing section data and integrates the various 2D section properties across the span to arrive at a 'semi-3D' solution. Unfortunately, you'll also need Matlab to be able to use MIAReX.
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AVL - Athena Vortice Lattice Method
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Yet another design program by professor Mark Drela and Harald Youngren. AVL is an extended vortice lattice method (VLM) software that supports aircraft configuration development by offering aerodynamic analysis, trim calculation and dynamic stability analysis, among other things.
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CEASIOM
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The CEASIOM application is a FREE Conceptual Aircraft design tool. It was developed within the frame of the SimSAC (Simulating Aircraft Stability And Control Characteristics for Use in Conceptual Design) Specific Targeted Research Project (STREP) approved for funding by the European Commission 6th Framework Programme on Research, Technological Development and Demonstration. Too bad this very nice tool too needs MATLAB to run....
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FEA - Finite Element Analysis (Structural Design)
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CalculiX
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A Free Three-Dimensional Structural Finite Element Analysis (FEA) software.
With CalculiX Finite Element Models can be build, calculated and post-processed. The pre- and post-processor is an interactive 3D-tool using the openGL API. The solver is able to do linear and non-linear calculations. Static, dynamic and thermal solutions are available. Both programs can be used independently. This tools seems to be developed with Linux in mind...
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Z88 Aurora
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Z88 Aurora is a free finite element software package for static calculation in mechanical engineering. Beside linear static analysis you can use it for large displacement analysis, steady state thermal analysis and natural frequency analysis. Z99 supports Unix & Linux, Windows and Mac OSX. It also features a mesh generator, DXF conversions and a native plotting program.
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CFD - Computational Flow Dynamics
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Elmer CFD
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Elmer is an open-source computational tool for multi-physics problems (FEA/FEM/CFD). It has been developed in collaboration with Finnish universities, research laboratories and industry. Elmer includes physical models of fluid dynamics, structural mechanics, electromagnetics, heat transfer and acoustics.
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OpenFlower CFD
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OpenFlower is an open source CFD software (FLOW solvER, literally) written in C++. It is mainly devoted to the resolution of the turbulent unsteady incompressible Navier-Stokes equations.
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Featflow CFD
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CFD (computational flow dynamics) software that solves the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations in 2D and 3D. A lot of software is offered for pre- and postprocessing as well.
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ISAAC CFD
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ISAAC (Integrated Solution Algorithm for Arbitrary Configurations) is a compressible Euler/Navier-Stokes computational 2D fluid dynamics code. Quite a few academic research projects used this older Fortran code.
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Generic CAD - Computer Aided Design
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DraftSight
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DraftSight lets professional CAD users, students and educators create, edit and view 2D DWG files. DraftSight runs on Windows®, Mac® and Linux. This free product is published by Dassault Systemes, the company behind Catia (perhaps that rings a bell). DraftSight can read and write DWG and DXF files.
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FreeCAD
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FreeCAD is a multiplatform parametric 3D modeler. Parametric modeling allows you to easily modify your design by going back into your model history and changing its parameters. FreeCAD is open source (LGPL license) and completely modular, allowing for very advanced extension and customization.
FreeCAD reads and writes many open file formats such as STEP, IGES, STL and others. If you have a faint acquaintance with SolidWorks the user interface might look somewhat familiar to you...
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