OpenVSP 3.25.0 Released

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Rob McDonald

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Aug 9, 2021, 9:59:36 PM8/9/21
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About five years ago, Justin Gravett made his first contributions to OpenVSP.  He has had his hands in pretty much every version since 3.9.0 and has been the source of most of the progress for about the last three and a half years.

Justin started by adding the 2D SVG and DXF export followed by XPatch export support.  He expanded our API coverage to be far more complete, also writing API documentation with examples for every routine.

Justin has kept the VSPAERO GUI up with Dave Kinney's continuous progress, also developing the VSPAERO V&V script.  The OpenVSP v3 Incarnation of FEAMesh structures capability was written by Justin.  It represented a huge capability leap from what was in v2.

Justin developed our capability to export intersected STEP and IGES files including BREP solids.  He also developed the Generic XSec lending great freedom to geometry modeling.

I'm sure I'm missing other contributions.  All along the way, he has found and fixed countless bugs across the codebase.

OpenVSP isn't losing Justin - but we are going to see less of him.  He is moving on to the next adventure in his life where OpenVSP will be more of a side hustle than his main gig.  We wish him luck and extend the greatest of thanks for all he has done for OpenVSP.


On to the 3.25.0 release...


This version is mostly bug fixes, but also has a significant update to VSPAERO.  Everyone should upgrade.

We have dropped the pre-built binaries for Win32.  Our build system was having trouble finding Python for Win32, so we're going to drop it and see if anyone notices.  If this is a problem for you, ask on the Google Group and we'll figure something out.

We hopefully have finally resolved the Python version issues we've had.

Win64 should be at Python 3.6.8
MacOS should be at Python 3.6.14
Ubuntu 20.04 should use 'apt-get install python3' which is 3.8.10
Ubuntu 18.04 should use 'apt-get install python3' which is 3.6.9

If the consensus is that we should move our Windows/MacOS Python support forward, we should be able to do so easily -- help us form a consensus on the Google Group.

Is anyone out there using OpenVSP Python API with Python 2?

VSPAERO v6.2.0 comes with lots of bug fixes and improvements including span load distribution plots for thick-surface solutions.  The VSPAERO viewer now does screenshots with PNG files and adds some animation generation support across platforms.  Generating a movie requires ffmpeg somewhere in your path.

The force/moment calculations are all re-written to use the Kutta Jukowski theorem for lift and drag, but explicit downwash calculations at edge centers (instead of loop averages).  Some differences are seen in drag, so Cd is calculated from the KJ theorem, but it also writes out Cdi as calculated from a TE / Trefftz-type method.  They should generally match for steady cases.

We now include OpenVSP and VSPAERO support for the experimental *.vspgeom file.  There are features to add and bugs to work out, but this will eventually be the only way of communicating geometry from OpenVSP to VSPAERO.  Think of it like a free development preview.

Features:
 - Updated VSPAERO Solver, Viewer, and CPSlicer to v6.2.0
 - Support for ReCref sweeps in VSPAERO
 - Adds reading of VSPAERO *.polar results
 - Improves behavior of vertical scroll bars
 - Add Mach and set name to Wave Drag output and file name (thanks anwarmou)
 - Improves drag and drop for skinning parameters (thanks anwarmou)
 - Improves detection of feature line and planar part intersections
 - Improves Debian installation instructions (thanks Cibin Joseph)

Bug Fixes:
 - Fixes for Total Wing Parameter Calculations
 - Fixes crash with exactly aligned Prop XSecs
 - Fixes upper/lower design mode for BORGeoms
 - Fixes multiple issues with parameter links
 - Fixes memory leaks in FEA Mesh and resizable columns
 - Updates shell property specification in NASTRAN export
 - Fix clearing of VSPAERO CpSlicer results
 - Fixes Python version specification in GitHub Actions build
 - Fixes update issue for Variable Presets
 - Fix problem with VSPAERO viewer not launching

Other:
 - Increases minimum CMake version from 2.8 to 3.1

Mohd Daniel Zakaria

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Aug 24, 2021, 11:55:24 PM8/24/21
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Hi Rob and team,

Great work guys. Just a quick report. Running a M1 MacOS Big Sur 11.5.2 and had issues initially to run VSPAero from OpenVSP 3.25.0. Had no issues with 3.24.0 and the issue was fixed by installing gcc@10 (using Homebrew). Already had gcc 11 while running OpenVSP 3.24.0.

best regards

Rob McDonald

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Aug 25, 2021, 1:16:59 AM8/25/21
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Very interesting.  I do not yet have access to an M1 Mac.  I'm glad it works at all....

On Mac, we build OpenVSP with xcode -- but we build vspaero with gcc.  GCC has better support for statically linking to OpenMP.  Those libraries are not installed by default on Macs, so we either have to bundle them or statically link.

We do specifically use gcc10 for this.  I don't know why 3.24 worked as I do not think we changed anything in this area in the latest version.

Since we're building against gcc, we also tell it to statically link the GCC standard C++ libraries -- as they are also not generally installed on a Mac.

It appears that this may not be sufficient to grab all the libraries needed on a M1 Mac....

I will try to do some research on this to see if we can make it simpler down the road. 

Rob


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Rob McDonald

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Oct 12, 2021, 7:20:37 PM10/12/21
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You might try re-downloading 3.25.0 from the website.

It still isn't a M1 native build, but the missing library should be restored.

Rob


On Tue, Aug 24, 2021 at 8:55 PM Mohd Daniel Zakaria <dan...@aerobumi.com> wrote:
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