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.
