Public Domain Aeronautical Software (PDAS)  

Panel codes, like Area Rule are success stories of the early days of computational aerodynamics. Panel codes generate the solution to problems in aerodynamics by superposition of elementary solutions.

This code is popularly known as the NASA Ames WingBody program. It is the outgrowth of a series of contracts with the Boeing Company for the development of a method of computing optimum camber and twist distributions on wing-body combinations at supersonic speeds. The contract work extended from 1966 to 1969 and the principal investigator was Frank Woodward.

After the completion of the contract work, the program underwent additional development at Ames and was widely distributed to airplane manufacturers and research laboratories. The original code for the IBM 7090 was updated when later machines such as the 360 and the CDC 7600 came on the scene.

Around 1980, the powerful surface panel codes such as Pmarc and PanAir became available and have today more or less replaced the mean surface codes such as WingBody. Those panel codes themselves have been superseded by computational fluid dynamics codes solving Euler or Navier-Stokes equations. However there is still a tradeoff between the time spent setting up the input for a computational technique versus the accuracy of the method. I have brought this program back to life for this collection as it has a certain balance of speed, ease of use and range of applicability that can make it an appropriate method of choice for airplane conceptual design.

Public Domain Aeronautical Software (PDAS)