SAGE: on Final Approach

At Aerion Technologies, we’ve been improving and testing SAGE, our Python-based CAD system, while designing the supersonic AS2. The capability of this geometry modeler has grown quite a bit, and we are excited about its upcoming public release in just a few weeks. Here's a model of an F-15 created from pictures on the internet, a high-quality display, a ruler, lines of Python code, and SAGE!

That's a screenshot from our browser-based viewer, particularly useful for looking at geometries generated on some HPC cluster far away. It's pretty nifty: it lets you browse the topology of your model, turn things on and off, change colors, and it can even create sections on the fly. Needless to say, it plays well with Cart3D triangulations, and will even display face labels such as GMP tags.

The geometry itself is clean, and SAGE makes a nice watertight tessellation. Here's a view of the blends around the engines.

That's more than good enough to run CFD on, so we did. Quite a bit. We ran Cart3D-adjoint-based optimization with SAGE in the loop computing surface gradients. With a capable geometry modeler, a robust solver, and a good optimizer, one can really scale the design-space search. At Aerion, hundreds of thousands of optimizer iterations with CFD in the loop are routine, and SAGE is a key enabler.

Here are Mach contours for one of the iterates during optimization, free stream is at Mach 1.5, and the inlets are flow-through but spilling nicely. If you look closely, you can see the component that was being optimized, nestled under the wing next to the intake.

We'll be showing this off (and more) at AIAA Aviation 2018 in Atlanta, GA, June 25-29. Come take a look!