Baldwin Technology Company, LLC

The Mono Tiltrotor has an aerodynamically streamlined shape in its airplane mode cruise configuration, and this shape was developed with the free, open source tool OpenFOAM.  This computational fluid dynamics (CFD) tool was used to locate areas where the airflow would separate from the aircraft, and then the aircraft's shape was iteratively improved and reanalyzed using OpenFOAM until flow separation was eliminated.

Unlike fixed wing aircraft which are modeled as a rigid body for many engineering analyses, rotorcraft are often modeled as a multibody system where, for instance, each rotor blade is modeled as a separate body.  The Mono Tiltrotor demands a multibody treatment not only because it is a rotorcraft, but also because the suspended cargo pod must be treated as a body apart from the rest of the aircraft.