OpenDatcom
Monday, 05 October 2009 14:02 | 
Written by Aleksey Matyushev | 
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Development in progress...
The United States Air Force (USAF) Stability and Control Digital DATCOM is a multi- purpose program written in FORTRAN that calculates the stability and control of an aircraft through analysis of its basic geometric structure. In addition, the DATCOM takes into account variable flight conditions (such as Mach and altitude) and the aircraft's propulsion elements. The DATCOM is able to compile meaningful aerodynamic coefficients that closely describe the performance and stability of the aircraft in numerous flight conditions.
DATCOM was written with 1970's technology and as a result some aspects of the program are outdated and/or archaic. A result of it's age the only input accepted by the Digital DATCOM is a tediously-formatted text file (for005.dat) that the user must generate according to FORTRAN syntax. In its purest form, the DATCOM format is time consuming to compile, troubleshoot, or even read. In addition, the only interaction a user has with the application is through the inherently difficult to use command prompt.
OpenDatcom is being developed to combat these (and many unmentioned) outdated features. OpenDatcom is written completely in Sun Microsystems Java SE and uses the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) to interface with USAF DATCOM. The interface is completely coded into OpenDatcom; as a result, no modification to the original DATCOM code is needed.
OpenDatcom uses an advanced GUI/development environment that allows the user to easily compile the input file and run DATCOM without any knowledge of DOS or the necessary FORTRAN formatting. In addition OpenDatcom processes, compiles, and exports the generated export of stability and performance coefficients. This feature was added with the specific intention of compiling three dimensional stability tables which can be copied straight into the FlightGear (using the JSBsim flight model) open source flight simulator. This allows for an aircraft to be analyzed in DATCOM and its flight to be tested in FlightGear.
Once completed, OpenDatcom will allow a user to quickly and easily follow the entire aircraft prototyping procedure from a paper design sketch, to a simulation-flyable model and everything in between
Last Updated (Wednesday, 06 January 2010 01:51)
