This release comes with a handful of small features and some nice bug fixes. It probably would have been 3.49.1, but the small features were a bunch of things I added to round out Geometry Analysis and Auxiliary Geom in support of the AIAA AVIATION paper I just finished (on Geometry Analysis). So, I figured it was good to have a nice round number to point at.

Geometry Analysis gained a few new tricks. Perhaps most significantly, several of the legacy analysis tools are now available through the Geometry Analysis Manager. This means that you can configure and interact with the analyses more easily – particularly for complex models.

This applies to CompGeom (called Wetted Area and Volume), Planar Slice, Projected Area, and Mass Properties. The old way isn’t going away, but I would encourage you to use the new way going forward. I think you’ll like it.

Geometry Analysis also gained an entirely new analysis capability — Risk Angle calculates the geometric risk angle for a fragment thrown from rotating machinery according to FAA AC 20-128A. This should be helpful for anyone doing safety analysis.

Several Auxiliary Geoms were added. The fragment types from AC 20-128A as well as the thrown blade description from AC 25.905-1 were added — unsurprisingly, these work directly with the Risk Angle analysis.

The pertinent tire and wheel failure modes from EASA AMC 25.734 were added. Thanks to the folks who helped me sort out the geometric definitions of some of those.

Finally, the tire spray geometry from ESDU 83042a was added. This ESDU uses empirical methods to predict the shape of the spray plume from landing gear. The new OpenVSP Auxiliary Geometry does not implement any of the ESDU methods. Instead, it simply creates a 3D representation of the spray envelope that is the output of the ESDU. So if you want to check your gear / engine placement for water ingestion, get a copy of ESDU 83042a and go to town.

Several missing holes in the API were filled. First, the ability to create, list, and delete Geometry Analyses was added. You could already execute them, but they had to be created in the GUI. Second, the ability to create, list, delete, and generally work with points along a FEA Structure poly spar. Similarly, previously these operations could only be done through the API.

I added routines to dump out a stack trace on demand. This is a debugging feature that isn’t hooked up to anything yet. However, I wanted to go ahead and roll it out so I could see if it breaks anything on any platform.

There are several fixes to issues that have been hitting users.

As it turns out, intersection points in CFD/FEA mesh were being created separately on each surface (even though an average point was computed), leading to the need to search and merge points later. This required a tolerance that has been problematic. Too big and real features / elements get squashed. Too small and CFD meshes aren’t water tight and FEA elements don’t connect.

The average point is now correctly used everywhere, which means the point merge tolerance can be very much smaller and all those problems should be resolved.

I figured out that Triangle will sometimes crash (and other times not) given identical geometric input — but with points in a different order. This was absolutely infuriating and led me to one of the ugliest hacks I’ve ever done. I am not proud, but it seems to be working better than it was before.

CFDMesh won’t crash if you’re using symmetry plane or outer boundary.

Un-used FEA Properties will no longer be deleted on startup.

Fix crash when reading files written with 3.42.0 that had spaces in Set names.

Some cleanups to the API documentation.

Features:

• Legacy analyses now available as Geometry Analyses — CompGeom, Planar Slice, Projected Area, Mass Properties
• Risk Angle Geometry Analysis
• AC 20-128A Rotor fragment Aux Geom
• AC 25.905-1 Thrown blade Aux Geom
• ESDU 83042a Tire spray Aux Geom
• AMC 25.734 Wheel and tire failure mode Aux Geom
• Geometry Analysis API
• FEA Poly Spar API

Fixes:

• Point gaps fixed along intersections in CFD / FEA Mesh
• Tolerance that was collapsing features and elements fixed
• Point order crash in Triangle worked around
• CFDMesh crash with symmetry plane or outer boundary
• Un-used FEA Properties no longer deleted
• Don’t crash when reading files from 3.42.0 with spaces in Set names