Fusion
My decade of work in water and airfoil optimisation is now a Fusion 360 Add-in. To begin with, I'm supporting:
- Wings (lifting foils) and Struts (low-drag symmetric foils)
- Cowlings (low-drag shapes for the nose or tail of anything in a flow)
- Propellers and Turbines, to be driven by a motor, or collect energy from flow
- Ducts suitable for use as a Propeller or Turbine shroud.
The Add-in collects the necessary information about the scale, medium, power, and/or expected conditions from you, and parametrically inserts the ideal shape best-suited to your intended purpose. "Ideal" is based on thousands of hours of CFD simulations and particle-swarm genetic optimisation for popular use cases, and typically out-performs legacy shapes (e.g. the best in the UIUC database by 10% to 100%, and all NACA shapes by 57% to 120%). Also included are facilities to perform specific optimisations for your exact needs, along with a suite of other tools.
This forum posting is here to solicit user (or potential users) suggestions, feedback, and comments, and also for bug-reports a help and feedback forum for users. For anything not suitable for public, I use gmail - my address is the same as my username on this forum - feel free to write to me directly.
IMPORTANT: If you need or work with airfoil or hydrofoil shapes, please have a think about what you would hope to see in this Add-in: as a programmer, it's vastly less expensive and time-consuming to accommodate future user cases from day one. If you want something, and can't see that we already do it, now is your chance! Let me know immediately, so I can be sure it's included in future.
The general operation is as follows:-
- Select what you want (wing, strut, prop, turbine, cowl, or duct) - which also defines what "optimal" means (e.g. best L/D for wings, lowest drag for struts)
- Decide where and how to place it (select points or lines in 2D, or paths and planes in 3D) which also defines the size and direction. Chose an optional center-of-moment point to auto-position for ideal angle-of-attack (which differs as a function of use conditions)
- Specify you medium (Air, Water, or other) and its property ranges (temperature, altitude, depth, salinity, turbulence)
- Specify your operating conditions: i.e. Speed range and surface finish (rough or smooth)
- Supply power details if relevant (input for propellers, or output for turbines)
The Add-in will insert foil points connected by spline or loft, and optionally also construction elements you can reference in your design (e.g. moment centers), parameter variables you might need to use, and reference polar diagrams and power charts etc that save with your project.
If you change your drawing (e.g. make a wing bigger), the new foil shape will be automatically re-computed and all data updated, so you can be sure that your design will always contains best-performing shapes no matter what you change. e.g. Models and Full-scale built from the same Fusion 360 project should generally both "just work".
This is a project likely to remain under constant development. Subscribe to this topic for updates.
Over to you! Do you need something not yet thought of here? Do you have a project you think this would be useful for?
Please click "like" if you would use this tool - so I can get some idea of how many people I'm doing this for!
