Tornado

Tornado is a Vortex Lattice Method for linear aerodynamic wing design applications in conceptual aircraft design or in aeronautical education. By modelling all lifting surfaces as thin plates, Tornado can solve for most aerodynamic derivatives for a wide range of aircraft geometries. With a very high computational speed, Tornado gives the user an immidiate feedback on design changes, making quantitative knowledge available earlier in the design process.

The code is implemented in  MATLAB and is being used at many universities and corporations around the world. It is still in a development phase with new functionality added. The code can either be run with a text based interface or in batch mode.

The code is being developed as a cooperation between the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), University of Bristol, Linköping University and Redhammer Consulting Ldt.

Software Features

Tornado allows for a wide variety of aircraft morphologies, the list below shows some of the available features. Please also have a look in the screenshots section.

Wing layout:
Each wing is built up of quadrilateral partitions with individual: Sweep, dihedral, twist, taper, trailing edge control surface, camber, NACA 4-digits and coordinate library wing profiles.

An aircraft is built up by multiple wings which can have a full 3D orientation with multiple control surfaces on ech wing . The wing may be  cranked and have variable mesh layout. Almost any concievable aircraft geometry can be described with the Tornado program.

Solver features

• Explicit forces in Newton's
• Treffz's plane analysis                                   
• International standard atmosphere                    
• Velocity in TAS, CAS or Mach
• Compressibility corrections for high subsonic Mach numbers                                               
  
  
• Trimmed polars
• Stability derivatives with respect to:
• Pitch and yaw
• Angular rates in pitch, roll and yaw.
• Control surface power derivatives
• Parameter sweep
• Dynamic pitch and yaw derivatives.

Sponsors

Tornado is being developed as a collaboration between KTH, Royal institute of Technology in Stockholm Sweden and University of Bristol, United Kingdom and the University of Linköping.