Modifying Geometry for Parameter Sweeps in pyAVL

pyAVL not only offers aerodynamic analysis capabilities but also provides tools to access and modify geometric parameters of your aircraft models. This documentation illustrates how users can retrieve and set geometry parameters for parameter sweeps.

Setting geometry parameters

To apply geometry changes to the AVLSolver object, use the set_surface_params method.

avl_solver.set_surface_params(data)

This method sets the surface parameters of the AVL model based on the provided dictionary, data. The data pasted to this method must be a dictionary of surface names whos values are a dictionary of surface and section keywords. An example of such a dictionary is

data = {
    'Wing': {
        'angle': 3.5,  # a surface keyword example
        "chords": np.array([0.5, 0.4, 0.3, 0.2, 0.1]) #section keyword example
    }
}

Getting geometry parameters

To retrieve surface parameters from your AVL model, use the get_surface_params method. By default, this method only returns data about the geometry of the surface, but information about the paneling and control surfaces can also be included by passing the corresponding flags like so.

surf_data = avl_solver.get_surface_params(
    include_geom=True,
    include_panneling=True,
    include_con_surf=True
)

The data from get_surface_params come directly from the geometry file used by AVL. See the AVL user guide for more information about all the possible variables. For most use cases, it is probable that you will only need to interact with the geometric variables below.

Variable	Description
scale	Scale factor.
translate	Translation vector.
angle	Surface angle.
aincs	Array of angle increments.
chords	Array of chord lengths.
xyzles	Array of leading edge coordinates.