A computer aided education course in aeroengine design

Abstract

In order to enhance the effectiveness of an air breathing engine design course for fourth year engineering students, a computer aided education system named AeroCAD has been under development at our university for the past six years. The basic paradigm of AeroCAD is the drafting of a number of fourteen reports that document the progress of the student in the gas dynamic design of the engine. The host program is therefore naturally a word processor. The computing environment is then enriched with small applications ('applets') that are called directly from within the word processor. These applets cover most computations required for aeroengine design including: mission analysis, thermodynamic cycle calculations, gas dynamic computations, strength computations. The best covered area at present is that of gas dynamics in which procedures are available for: inviscid analysis, boundary layer calculations of various types, numerical solution of the potential equation, small scale Euler or Navier-Stokes simulations. Ease of access is ensured by extensive on-line documentation and application of graphic user interface facilities.