DARTFlo

DARTFlo (Discrete Adjoint for Rapid Transonic Flows, abbreviated as DART) is an open-source C++/python, unstructured finite-element, full potential solver, developed at the University of Liège by Adrien Crovato with the active collaboration of Romain Boman, and under the supervision of Vincent Terrapon and Grigorios Dimitriadis, during the academic years 2018-2022.
DART is currently capable of rapidly solving steady transonic flows on arbitrary configurations, ranging from 2D airfoils to 3D full aircraft (without engine), as well as calculating the flow gradients using a discrete adjoint method. Furthemore, the code is interfaced with CUPyDO and openMDAO so that aeroelastic computations and optimization can be easily carried out.

Main features

• Cross platform (Windows and Unix) C++/python code
• Physical model
  • unstructured meshes for 2D and 3D geometries using gmsh
  • steady transonic flows
  • viscous-inviscid interaction (2D only)
• Numerical methods
  • linear algrebra using Eigen and Intel MKL or openBLAS
  • direct (forward) and adjoint (backward) modes
  • nonlinear Newton solver with Bank&Rose line search
  • linear Intel PARDISO, Eigen GMRES or MUMPS solvers
• Interfaced with
  • VTK
  • CUPyDO
  • openMDAO

Documentation

Detailed build and use instructions can be found in the wiki.

References

Crovato Adrien, Steady Transonic Aerodynamic and Aeroelastic Modeling for Preliminary Aircraft Design, PhD thesis, University of Liège, 2020.

Crovato Adrien, DARTFlo - Discrete Adjoint for Rapid Transonic Flows, Technical note, University of Liège, 2021.

Crovato A., Boman R., et al., A Full Potential Static Aeroelastic Solver for Preliminary Aircraft Design, 18th International Forum on Aeroelasticity and Structural Dynamics, IFASD 2019.

Bilocq Amaury, Implementation of a viscous-inviscid interaction scheme in a finite element full potential solver, Master thesis, University of Liège, 2020.