tmbg wrote:I'm not so much concerned about the aerodynamic analysis in SWx, mostly just overall design and structural analysis. We're working on a tube and fabric fuse/wood and fabric wings design, and I dunno what the best way is to model, ferinstance, the wings.
You can definately do structural analysis on the spar... Provided SWx has materials files on what you're using (you may have to import them, I haven't done any wood spars in SWx so I'll have to look...)
tmbg wrote:
I wrote a program that takes a NACA section number and generates an IGES file with a set of lines defining that shape (doing the whole NACA equation thing), and then I can import that shape into SWx as a 2d sketch... my plan was to use that and loft it along paths, but I dunno if that's the best way to do things, and I'm not sure how to incorporate in taper. We're playing with elliptical wing designs, and they're pretty complicated.
All of the NACA eqns. are driven by the chord length wrt. their co-ordinates. Once you have your ellipse defined that will give you your chord length at each station, use that chord length to generate the NACA airfoil form for each station.
You can use SWx to loft between/along several airfoils, but you're going to have to get them into a 3D drawing. Other than being able to look at the wing I don't know what value it will give if you're using fabric. The main advantage with using this type of loft with sheet metal is that when incorporated in the wing assembly you can put in all of the fastners and then 'unfold' all of the pieces and maintain the fastner whole placements as well as the flat sheet outline, cut and bend lines...
