Post-processing of VSPAero results

[Mike Henson]

Is it possible to access VSPAero results for post-processing using the API or Angel script?

I am interested in recovering surface pressure distributions and aero mesh definition to map pressures to a structural mesh.

The VSPAero doucmentation mentions a .adb file which appears to be binary, but no additional information.

Alternatively, is it possible to output this data from the solver?

[Rob McDonald]

Mike,

It isn't possible right now.

We're working on making integrated coefficients, convergence history,
and the load distribution available in the OpenVSP GUI and also
through the Results Manager API. However, there are no current plans
to go into depth of what is contained in the ADB file (surface
pressures, panel agglomeration scheme, wake geometry, etc.).

Our assumption had been that running VSPAERO through the GUI was a
convenience feature, and a tool doing tight coupling like you describe
would probably interact more closely via the command line (taking
OpenVSP out of the loop). Further, we didn't have any need for that
data in OpenVSP itself, so it hasn't been worth the effort to parse it
back in.

The 'easy' place to start would be to look at the ADB file parsing in
the viewer.

There are a lot of changes to VSPAERO that are coming down the pipe.
These changes will change the file formats along the way. ADB will
still be a binary file written with the same techniques, but the
field-for-field data order will surely change in places.

So, some exploratory integration efforts are probably a good idea, but
you may want to wait for the wave of updates to pass before you get
too deep.

If the use cases are there, we can certainly look into parsing the ADB
file back into VSP and making the data available via ResultsManager,
but I'm not sure it makes a lot of sense. If we did that, we would
certainly start with the ADB reader from Viewer.

Rob

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[Mike Henson]

Thanks Rob - makes sense to wait on the updates.

Mike

[deenri...@gmail.com]

Has there been any updates on this?

Can any Python API functions help with reading VSPAERO  output files?

Thanks, 

- Daniel

[Rob McDonald]

What in particular do you need to read?

All the loads, load distributions, convergence history, Cp slices, etc. are output to plain text files from VSPAERO and are parsed into OpenVSP and are available via the API.  There are some text files (like *.fem) that are output, but not parsed by OpenVSP -- they may be useful to you.

The Cp distribution and wake positions are only written to the binary adb file -- they are only read by vspviewer.  If you need this data, I suggest you hack vspviewer to read the data.

Rob

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/openvsp/ef2bc805-4793-45a1-b2e8-f02af70d05c9n%40googlegroups.com.

[deenri...@gmail.com]

Wanted to read in the stab and lod files into native python data structures. I was wondering if there were built-in methods to access the data. If not, Ill have to write my own parser. 

Thanks!

[Rob McDonald]

lod files are certainly read in -- I don't think stab files are.

But, to get at this data easily, you will need to run vspaero through the analysis manager -- then the parsed results will be in the results manager.

Rob

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/openvsp/a05fcb94-965a-4c7e-86c1-ac45ad50c8d7n%40googlegroups.com.