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.
At the time that this streamlining work was performed, open source grid generation techniques were insufficient to the task. Baldwin Technology Company, LLC developed and published an open source tool for OpenFOAM hexahedral grid generation that integrated Blender with CalculiX. OpenFOAM now includes a hexahedral mesh generation utility called snappyHexMesh, and this utility along with Blender's subsurf mesh modifier and stereolithographic model export would likely be used for future CFD grid generation work.
Note that Baldwin Technology Company, LLC contracted with a commercial vendor to have them calculate the aerodynamic drag on the Mono Tiltrotor using a commercial CFD code that had been validated by the aerospace industry specifically for the purpose of predicting aircraft drag. Simply speaking, OpenFOAM was used to design the aircraft for minimum drag, and then validated commercial methods were used to quantify the drag.
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