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 and curves on the aircraft surface.
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 Viewer that enables also the 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
After more than a year of development, we finally released TiGL 3.0. TiGL 3 is the first release that is compatible with the CPACS 3 standard.
TiGL 3 contains many changes, but the most important ones are:
We finally released the second release candidate of TiGL 3.0. This release candidate contains all features that we wanted to have in the TiGL 3 release. From now on, we will have a feature freeze and will only fix major bugs before we finally publish TiGL 3.
We tested …
Parametric modeling of engine nacelles and pylons are now possible with TiGL 3.0.
Within the DLR internal project Victoria, parametric descriptions of both engine pylons and engine nacelles were added to the CPACS standard. Previously these airplane components could only be added as an external geometric component, that is …
CPACS 3 offers many new ways to define wing structural elements. Spars can now be defined between two ribs. Ribs also have a multitude of ways to be positioned, including the positioning
During the TiGL development, we tried to make TiGL backwards compatible as much as possible. This includes the support for old systems with old compilers, support for Qt 4 and Python 2.7.
C++ 11 opens up many new programming paradigms that we don't want to miss anymore. Many of …
The TiGL website is online. We decided to host this website for the TiGL Library to keep in touch with the users. The Github repository alone works fine for hosting our code, but it lacks a way to add more information, documentation etc.
The website - once it is finished - should …