Slow Chat

[Windy_Skies]

https://www.reddit.com/r/CFD/comments/lvpuya/i_just_published_the_first_validated_version_of/

In late 2018, I became curious about biological flight. To sate this curiosity, I wanted to computationally simulate some flapping wing fliers. I quickly realized I had two options:

1. Spend thousands of dollars on a closed-source CFD program, which would take hours to solve a simple case.
2. Try to learn someone else’s open-source, unsteady solver written in a language I didn’t know, and using a framework that is overly complicated for my use case.

Neither of these seemed like the right choice.

Thankfully, my friend, Peter Sharpe, had just released his own open-source aerodynamics solver: AeroSandbox. With his blessing, I have used AeroSandbox as a jumping-off point to develop a solver package capable of unsteady simulations.

Through the combined efforts of Peter Sharpe, Suhas Kodali, and me, Ptera Software was born. It is the only easy-to-use, open-source, and actively-maintained UVLM package I know capable of analyzing flapping wing flight. Moreover, it’s written in Python, is well documented, and is well tested.

With your help, I hope we will increase the open-source community’s interest and understanding of biological flight.