The optimization of an aircraft e.g. to minimize fuel consumption involves many disciplines, each with their own simulation tools. Many of these simulation tools require a precise modeling of the aircraft geometry. At the DLR, this task is performed by the software TiGL (TiGL Geometry Library), which generates a complete 3-dimensional geometric representation of the aircraft from a parametric geometry description. This includes both the outer geometry, which is exposed to the air flow, and the inner structural geometry, which is crucial for the load stability of the aircraft.
TiGL thus provides the interface between the parametric CPACS description of the aircraft and the simulation tools. TiGL offers functions for exporting the geometry to common CAD formats (IGES, STEP, VTK) as well as functions for calculating points or curves on the aircraft surface and functions for directly editing fuselage or wings.
TiGL uses the OpenCASCADE CAD kernel to model the aircraft geometry with NURBS surfaces. The library also provides interfaces to many common programming languages such as C, C++, Python, Java and MATLAB. In addition, the TiGL software package includes the TiGL Creator. This provided Graphical User Interface (GUI) also enables the direct modification of CPACS configurations and visualization of the aircraft geometries and other CAD files.
TiGL is developed at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) at the department of High-Performace Computing. Find an overview about TiGL on the feature page or have a look at this survey article.
TiGL is available as Open Source and we encourage anyone to make use of it. If you are applying TiGL in a scientific environment and publish any related work, please cite the following artice:
Siggel, M., Kleinert, J., Stollenwerk, T. et al.: TiGL: An Open Source Computational Geometry Library for Parametric Aircraft Design. Math.Comput.Sci. (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11786-019-00401-y
A free copy of this paper can be accessed under the following link: https://rdcu.be/bIGUH
We are happy to announce that we just released TiGL 3.5.0.
We have just release TiGL 3.4.1.
We are happy to update the pre-release of the CPACS Creator to Version 0.2.0
This update includes an update to the recent release of TiGL 3.4.0 and hence is compatible to CPACS 3.4.
The pre-release is available as a conda package. We recommend installation …
We are happy to announce the release of TiGL 3.4.0.
The new release features:
Added ability to read CPACS 3.5 (while raising a warning that CPACS version is newer than supported version)
Implementation of standard fuselage profiles, i.e. rounded rectangle …
We are happy to announce TiGL’s new duct feature, that will be included in the coming release. It allows the user to create duct cutouts in wings and fuselages.
Based on a corresponding new CPACS development, TiGL was extended to support ducts and duct assemblies for aircraft configurations. It …
We are happy to announce the release of TiGL 3.2.2.
Although it is a bugfix release, TiGL 3.2.2 comes with the support of canard style flaps. This is a minor modification of the trailing edge device definition, that allows to position the hinge points of the …
We are happy to announce the release of the TiGL 3.2 series. The new release features:
We finally achieved our milestone TiGL 3.1.
Together with our partners from Airbus Defense and Space and DLR Institute of System Architectures in Aeronautics, we implemented some major futures. The most notable features of TiGL 3.1 are:
TiGL 3.1 is approaching with CPACS 3.1 compatibilty and three new major features. These are...
TiGL 2 users already know the support for trailing and leading edge devides. We finally backported the code from TiGL 2 into our new code …
This blog post was created by Nabih Naeem for the CPACS IFAR-X challenge. Nabih was so kind to provide this tutorial also as a TiGL blog post.
The MATLAB libraries are available under the paths:
\share\tixi3\matlab\share\tigl3\matlabThe location of libraries of TiXI …