The 2013 OpenVSP Workshop will be held 7-9 August in San Luis Obispo California. There is a $99 registration fee.

The agenda will include presentations and tutorials. Topics will range from introductory to advanced modeling techniques, connections between VSP and analysis tools, and updates on recent/ongoing developments in VSP.

Please email Rob McDonald if you would like to present at the workshop. Please include a title or short description of what you would like to present. We can’t guarantee to accomodate everyone, but we are trying to construct a comprehensive workshop.

The workshop information web site is online and will be updated as the agenda is set.

The workshop registration web site is also online and ready to receive your registration.… Read more

Version 2.2.3 contains a triplet of small bug fixes that have bitten some users. I have been putting these off waiting for an upcoming feature release, but now seems to be the time to get these out there.

Bug fixes in this release:

• Threaded version check
• Fix CG contribution of point mass components
• Fix CFDMesh half models when a surface is actually cut

Placing the version check in its own thread allows VSP execution to continue during the version check. This is significant for situations where the computer has internet connectivity, but the VSP web server is experiencing problems. The HTTP library used by VSP does not let you change the timeout from 60 seconds, so in these situations, VSP paused for 60 seconds on startup.

The CG contribution of point mass components was cal… Read more

Version 2.2.2 has been a long time coming. I have been waiting on a few features to make a 2.3.0 release, but finally decided it was better to get these fixes out sooner than later.

The mesh growth limiting step of CFDMesh ‘Build Target Mesh’ has been totally re-written. This new version should be vastly faster for just about anyone out there. The new BTM algorithm follows the surface topology rather than doing a full spatial search. For the rare cases where a full spatial search is still required, there is an optional flag to enable it. Even that mode should still be much faster than before.

Bug fixes in this release:

• Don’t close already closed file in readVspAirfoil (Linux crash)
• Fix MS_Wing chord update on scale
• Fix warnings on various

… Read more

Version 2.2.1 contains a number of small bug fixes.  One of thes fixes is particularly important — everyone should upgrade.

The nastiest bug caused components added from the ‘external’ default component set to have the ID number of that component.  If multiple such components were added, this could cause duplicate IDs in the model.  IDs are expected to be unique, so this causes significant problems.

The external BWB defaults that ship with VSP include a MS_Wing component with ID 42078344.  This is the most likely number to be duplicated.

If your model has duplicate IDs, you may see strange behavior including problems with parent/child relationships, parameter linking, and wetted area/volume totals from CompGeom.

I… Read more

VSP is incredibly effective at putting together advanced aircraft concepts that can ask fundamental “What if?” questions – and help to quickly get answers whether it’s worth continuing a new line of thought.  A recent conceptual design study that we conducted at NASA Langley asked the question “Is it possible to reduce the operating costs of an advanced General Aviation (GA) aircraft by a factor of 10?”  Asking such a question requires establishing a good baseline model (such as the Cirrus SR-20/22), and then putting together a good conceptual geometric representation of the proposed solution to compare to that State-of-the-Art (SOA) reference.  So I thought you’d like see one of the VSP model concepts we came up with to meet this question, and a … Read more

OpenVSP 2.2.0 is the first new release we’ve made since we implemented download tracking from the openvsp.org website.  So, it is very exciting to see that 30 days after its release, 1,009 people have downloaded 2.2.0.  Anyone compiling from source (all Linux/BSD users) or obtaining it from a friend won’t appear here.

Although the large majority of downloads are from the US, VSP is being downloaded and used globally.  Here is a summary of the countries for those downloads.

Within the US, the majority of downloads appear to go to locations with large university aerospace engineering departments.  Hampton VA does edge out Blacksburg VA.  At least one large company has made OpenVSP available on their intranet – so those users wouldn’t … Read more

Version 2.2.0 includes many features and improvements in all corners of the program.  There should be something here for everyone, so go ahead and upgrade.

My favorite feature is the ‘r’ key.  Place the mouse over the model and press ‘r’ to change the center of rotation.

Many users will appreciate that we can now read both of the file formats used in the UIUC airfoil database.  Please let us know if you find any airfoil files in the database that you can’t read.

Users doing trade or optimization studies will want to check out the design and XDDM support.  These features should make it very easy to use VSP in your next design study.

In addition, there were a whole host of small fixes and improvements.  Some of these bugs we… Read more

The Inaugural VSP Workshop is now comfortably in the rearview mirror.  It was exhilarating to get so many interested people together to learn about and work on VSP.

A number of the sessions were far too ambitious — for three days, few things went as planned.  There are certainly lessons to be learned, but overall, I could not be more pleased with how the whole thing went.

We had 53 attendees from all aspects of the aerospace community.  Industry, government, academia, small business, private individuals, and students were all well represented.  All manner of applications were represented including missiles, aircraft, and rotorcraft; every speed regime was represented — sub-, tran-, super-, and hypersonic as well as launch vehicles.

Some ca… Read more