Application of B-spline techniques to the modeling of airplane wings and numerical grid generation

In the present paper we give account of an effort that aimed at the unification of the whole geometric preprocessing that preceded the wind tunnel readings with a realistic airplane wing model in a recent research project. This preprocessing includes the automated generation of the CAD models which were used for the manufacturing of the multi-parted wing-fuselage configuration and the generation of the numerical grids for the corresponding numerical simulations. Due to the constraints of the project it was decided to employ only exact, watertight, untrimmed B-Spline representations. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.