ISAE-SUPAERO makes its FAST-OAD-GA open source software available to the scientific community

The exploration and evaluation of conventional or innovative futur aircraft configurations takes a comprehensive design approach with a highly integrated multidisciplinary dimension, which is being further strengthened to analyze the architectures planned to reduce aviation’s environmental footprint. As part of its work, the Aircraft Design research group at ISAE-SUPAERO develops and implements tools adapted to these evaluations at the preliminary design stage.

FAST-OAD (Future Aircraft Sizing Tool – Overall Aircraft Design) is a software package developed jointly by ISAE-SUPAERO and ONERA for the preliminary design, analysis and optimization of aircraft.
This is a sizing code that includes models with suitable levels of fidelity to describe the different physical aspects involved in aircraft design: aerodynamics, propulsion, mass, geometry, performances, flight qualities, certification requirements, etc. With FAST-OAD, these disciplines interact through multidisciplinary analysis and optimization techniques to design and evaluate aircraft meeting the top-level requirements defined by the user.

Under the ISAAR Chair-Innovative Solutions for Aircraft Architecture & Regulation, ISAE-SUPAERO has developed FAST-OAD-GA (Future Aircraft Sizing Tool – Overall Aircraft Design – General Aviation), a version of FAST-OAD adapted to the design of CS-23 category airplanes.

This version is being made available to the community through open-source distribution. For conventional single-engine or twin-engine aircraft architectures, it includes physical models adapted to general aviation and a propulsion system based onpiston engine–propeller combination, which will be rounded out with an advanced turboprop model. These models can be customized by the user or replaced with proprietary models. FAST-OAD-GA is already being used by many students for their research projects as part of the curriculum at ISAE-SUPAERO or during internships.

FAST-OAD-GA provides the basics needed towards evaluation of novel architectures of light airplanes. Variants are being adapted for the design of an electric-hybrid/hybrid airplane using batteries and fuel cells as energy sources, and for the design of aircraft with distributed electric propulsion. These are currently being developed by the Aircraft Design research group within the ISAAR Chair.

Link to install the open-source distribution of FAST-OAD-GA

Contacts : Joël JEZEGOU, Florent LUTZ