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Structure and function of the aircraft design program PrADO

Author: Lionel Salavin

Project

Abstract

This report is a description of the aircraft design software PrADO. PrADO is the name of an aircraft pre design and optimisation program, which already proved its capacities in many projects. The main goal of this report is about helping to understand the functions and structure of PrADO in order to modify it. Therefore, it provides a description of its main possibilities, as a short manual of the program, based on previous paper aiming to document it. As the reports aim to help to understand the structure of the program, it analyzes the organisation of the different files, which constitute the software. It explains what each kind of file does for the program and where it is located in the windows folders. The first distinction between each kind of files shows that the most important files are the Fortran files, which are organised into modules executable and libraries of functions. Therefore, it is relevant to have an overview of the first modules and a short description of the most important libraries. Since this report is part of a cooperation between the HAW and the IFL, which aim to add a turbofan module in PrADO, it observes in detail every module and each important file of libraries related to the propulsion. Particular attention is given to the computation of nnthe turbofan‘s performance.

The end of this report consists of two parts addressed to two different kinds of readers:
-An Analysis of the methodology needed to understand the program is there for any new comer to PrADO’s source code.
-An open discussion on the program is addressed to the PrADO’s programmer to submit some propositions concerning the coding and the automatic generation of documentation for PrADO.