Nowadays, the state-of-the-art CFD solvers (FEM, VOF, LBM) can provide incredibly accurate results for almost any geometry.
However, the solution comes at the price of high amount of computational resources.
To circumvent this issue, low-fidelity approaches like the Vortex Lattice Method (VLM) can be employed for particular types of computational problems.
The VLM is a helpful tool in the conceptual design phase of aircraft or sailing yacht as it allows designers to quickly estimate the performance of numerous different models.
Due to the specifics of conditions in which a sailing yacht operates, the VLM solvers dedicated to aircraft design can not be adopted in a straightforward fashion.
Here, we present the pySailingVLM, the first open-source Python package which implements the Vortex Lattice Method for the initial aerodynamic analysis of upwind sails.
Through its lightweight requirements, the software can be easily installed and executed locally or accessed in a cloud environment such as Binder.
pySailingVLm can be used as cli script or inside Jupyter Notebook. For more information see docs and interative Notebooks examples.
pySailingVLM calculates forces, coefficients, moments acting on sails. Results are visualized and plotted:
Users can also see colormap with their sails:
Sample graphs generated by pySailingVLM:
And
Please follow documentation for installation and usage.