Design & Analysis
From mission requirement to a converged airframe definition, with the aerodynamic and structural evidence to stand behind it.
Conceptual design and sizing
Programmes commit to a configuration in the first two weeks and live with it for two years. That decision is usually made in a spreadsheet.
Conceptual design is a circular problem: wing area drives weight, weight drives thrust, thrust drives battery mass, which drives weight again. Most teams stop at the first answer that looks reasonable. Professional MDO tools are scoped and priced for primes designing transport aircraft.
A convergence solver built around small unmanned aircraft, where the closure loop is mass rather than fuel fraction. Sizing converges in seconds and reports the sensitivity of every output to every input, so a team can see which assumptions the design actually rests on. Runs are versioned and diffable.
A survey UAV programme where the hand-calculated endurance target proved unreachable at the chosen wing loading. Found before tooling was committed, the reconfiguration cost days rather than an airframe.
Aerodynamic analysis and airfoil design
Teams need coefficients and stability derivatives good enough to size control surfaces and tune a flight controller, without standing up a CFD practice.
The gap between a panel method and full CFD is enormous in cost and fidelity. Panel methods are fast but miss separation. CFD is accurate but needs mesh expertise, licences and hours per run. Small teams over-trust the fast tool or skip the analysis.
A graduated fidelity ladder in one interface: rapid panel and vortex-lattice sweeps across the design space, escalating to meshed CFD only for conditions that matter. Every result carries an explicit confidence band, so a low-fidelity number is never mistaken for a validated one.
A VTOL transition study where low-fidelity sweeps narrowed forty candidate configurations to three. Only those three went to meshed CFD.
Structures, loads and margins
Airframes must be shown to carry design loads with margin, documented well enough to survive a certification review.
Load cases multiply fast: manoeuvre, gust, landing, hard-over control surface, one-engine-out. Keeping structural models synchronised with moving geometry is where teams lose control, and margins get computed against a revision that no longer exists.
Load cases are defined against the Planform definition rather than a static CAD file, so a geometry change automatically flags every affected case as stale. Margin tables regenerate on demand carrying the provenance of the geometry and material data behind them.
A composite wing revision where a late spar-cap layup change invalidated eleven load cases. All eleven flagged automatically, against a manual audit that historically takes a week.
Tell us what you are flying and where the programme is losing time. We will tell you honestly which of these helps and which does not.