AFEM — Airframe Finite Element Modeler

AFEM is a "fit-for-purpose" engineering development toolkit designed to support the use of high-order structural analysis during the early phases of aircraft conceptual design. As a development toolkit, it provides the engineer with a flexible, modular, and extensible library of components and tools to rapidly build a useful structural model. It is not an end-user GUI application, but rather a library enabling engineers to rapidly build their own application specific tools and processes, encoding their own design rules and best practices along the way.

Although AFEM targets airframe design and analysis applications, really only the afem.structure and afem.oml packages directly support that cause. All the other packages provide a more general and "Pythonic" set of entities and tools that could potentially be used to develop applications in other disciplines and/or domains.

Getting started using conda

Conda packages are available for a number of platforms and Python versions. Get started with:

conda create -n afem python=3.8
activate afem
conda install -c conda-forge -c trelau afem

This will create an environment named "afem" and install AFEM and all necessary dependencies. You can replace the "afem" environment name with anything you'd like.

The best way to get started is to examine and run the files in the examples/ folder. Running the script:

python structure_wingbox.py

should generate an image similar to the one shown below. Remember to make sure the appropriate environment is active when using AFEM is applicable.

Installation files can be cleaned by:

conda clean -a

Building documentation

The documentation can be built from sources using sphinx. Install sphinx and sphinx_rtd_theme in the desired conda environment by:

conda install sphinx sphinx_rtd_theme

Then navigate to the docs/ folder and run:

make html

This should build html documentation in a docs/build/html folder. Open the index.html file with a web browser.

Examples

Finding mesh nodes shared between the spars and ribs:

Fuselage section with frames, floors, and floor supports modeled as beams:

Flexibility to define custom structural components like a circular spar:

Structural geometry defined and joined between the wing and fuselage: