Conceptual Aircraft Design

Preliminary or Conceptual Aircraft Design

TORNADO - Vortex Lattice Method - VLM A Vortex Lattice Method (VLM) implemented in MATLAB. The code is intended for linear aerodynamic wing design applications, in conceptual aircraft design or in aeronautical education. Among other things it can do such nice things as computing and displaying the Treffz plane velocity vector field. Known Cessna C-172 data was used to validate the code agains other codes such as AVL, VIRGIT and CMARC.
NASA's OpenVSP OpenVSP (Vehicle Sketch Pad) is NASA's free parametric aircraft geometry design tool. OpenVSP allows the user to create a 3D model of an aircraft defined by common engineering parameters. This model can be processed into formats suitable for engineering analysis.
XFLR5 Airfoil and Wing analysis tool XFLR5 uses XFOIL as its computation kernel and adds a graphical user interface for Windows operating systems. You still need the XFOIL manual to find your way around. XFLR5 also offers a 3D wing design capability, using two different calculation schems. The one similar to MIAReX (described further down below) uses the built in XFOIL kernel to determine local wing section properties. Highly recommended!
MIAReX A calculation method for Xfoil and multi-airfoil wings, based on formulae developed by James C. Sivells & Robert H. Neely in NACA TN-1269 (1947). Basically it takes 2D wing section data and integrates the various 2D section properties across the span to arrive at a 'semi-3D' solution.
CEASIOM The CEASIOM application is a free Conceptual Aircraft Design tool. It was developed within the frame of the SimSAC (Simulating Aircraft Stability And Control Characteristics for Use in Conceptual Design) Specific Targeted Research Project (STREP) approved for funding by the European Commission 6th Framework Programme on Research, Technological Development and Demonstration.
AVL AVL is an extended vortice lattice method (VLM) software that supports aircraft configuration development by offering aerodynamic analysis, trim calculation and dynamic stability analysis, among other things. A design program by professor Mark Drela and Harald Youngren.
PANUKL From the manual: PANUKL 2012 is the next version of the package (after 2002) and can be used for aerodynamic computation of an aircraft, using (a) low order panel method.