Customizing Problem Setup

Specifying a Reference Area

In order to use a specific reference area for calculating coefficients, rather than the default approach of area-weighted averaging of each lifting surface, a few modifications must be done. First, an option need to be passed to either AeroPoint or AeroStructPoint when it’s intialized:

aero_group = AeroPoint(surfaces=surfaces, user_specified_Sref=True)

or in the aerostructural case,

AS_point = AerostructPoint(surfaces=surfaces,user_specified_Sref=True)

Next, a new independent variable called S_ref_total needs to be created in the run script. Here it is set to the value of areaRef. Then, for each analysis point, this variable needs to be connected to each analysis point for performance computation.

indep_var_comp.add_output('S_ref_total', val=areaRef, units='m**2')
prob.model.connect('S_ref_total', point_name + '.S_ref_total')