FreeCAD News

As FreeCAD is com­plete­ly open it often gets used for real­ly inter­est­ing exper­i­ments and aca­d­e­m­ic research. Recent­ly we became aware of this excel­lent paper, “Machine-opti­mized para­met­ric com­put­er assist­ed design (CAD) of a sta­ble fly­ing wing UAV glid­er”.

It’s a fas­ci­nat­ing piece of work, a fly­ing wing uncrewed aer­i­al vehi­cle (UAV) is designed para­met­ri­cal­ly in FreeCAD. Eleven para­me­ters are bro­ken out which con­trol the wing geom­e­try and these are auto­mat­i­cal­ly adjust­ed. Each wing iter­a­tion then is con­vert­ed into a mesh and sub­ject­ed to test­ing using com­pu­ta­tion­al flu­id dynam­ics (CFD) via the CFDOF work­bench. The CFD work­bench is an excel­lent FreeCAD work­bench that col­lates a lot of open source tools and solvers, most notably Open­Foam, togeth­er in an easy to set up, GUI dri­ven environment.

As each wing iter­a­tion is meshed and in turn analysed, the macros run to adjust the para­me­ters in response to the results, dialling in the opti­mi­sa­tion of the wing design. All the scripts and macro are avail­able on this repos­i­to­ry but do note that they indi­cate that this is only run­ning well on ver­sion 1.0. It would be great to see oth­ers pick up on this work aim­ing for com­pat­i­bil­i­ty with new­er ver­sions. It also requires pret­ty seri­ous machines to run well, think lots and lots of cores!

Also men­tioned in the excel­lent paper, which is freely avail­able for all here, is that the opti­mised wing design was then made in real life and test flown by an expe­ri­enced UAV pilot. The wing was made from foam which was cut and formed with a hot wire cut­ter. Inter­est­ing­ly else­where in the FreeCAD com­mu­ni­ty there is the amaz­ing Foam­cut work­bench which cre­ates CAM files/Toolpaths for hot wire cut­ting machines, of which there are many open source designs. One can’t help but think that FreeCAD is becom­ing the go to CAD solu­tion for fixed wing UAV!