Catia Users

Are those points, which you import from excel planar (all laying on the same plane) or is your spline a 3D curve?

Wing design is not easy, unless you just want to make a pretty 3D model.

Assuming you plan to design and fabricate the wings for your RC airplane, then you will have to do things like copying and scaling the airfoil to get the wing surface.

I'm not aware of any CAD system that has a simple WING DESIGN app.

It is a 2d geometrical object (there is a column in Excel with full of 0s)

I was planning to join these 2d objects with the multilayer solid tool.

To be honest, never tried to loft it, dont't know what to expect, but will try just for fun :)

(I was using the GSD_PointSplineLoft excle file in CATIA folder.)

Yes, exactly, but (for me) the million dollar question is, how to scale and copy an imported airfoil like you can do with your own made sketch?

Realizing how new to CATIA I am Im hoping there are some tools that can work around my problem or directly adress it.

The NACA profiles should not really be manipulated. It is a task that will take time for sure.

You can download the profiles from https://airfoiltools.com/ and loft them for the desired wing.

There are so many methods you could use, but not a single "make a wing" process, I'm finding it difficult to help you.

Using the excel program to make a spline curve from the points is a good start. There are 2 ways you could manipulate the airfoil: with excel (and rerun the excel macro), or with CATIA.

I would use the GSD (surface) workbench to model the wing shape - not the Part Design workbench. (I'm still not sure if you plan to fabricate the wing; 3D print/balsa wood/machine, or what you're final objective is). I would probably use the Transformation tools (Scaling/Translate/Axis-To-Axis) and the Multi-Section Surface tool, along with many other GSD tools. Have you analyzed the spline for smoothness?)

Maybe we would better understand your question if you could attach a hand drawing of what you want the wing to look like along with some dimensions (wing span/cord length/etc).

Another suggestion: practice and learn more CATIA methods by making some simple shapes/parts.

There are many CATIA tutorials on YouTube. This video seems to explain the basic steps to design a wing in CATIA:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Izf2djSrScM

Well then I would use a sketch for your purposes.

• Import your excel points and make a spline in GSD
• Define a sketch plane (laying on the spline) and project the spline into the sketch. You can isolate the projected geometry to do any "postprocessing" with it.
• By changing the sketch plane and the sketch projection point and orientation you can move the sketch on other places => Moving, scaling etc...

I hope this can help you!

Cheers!

Yes, thank you!

What I usually do to scale and modify the airfoil is put the airfoil in a geometrical set and whenever I want to move it or change its size I copy it and change its position whit the translate, rotate and scalling comands form Generative Shape Design. With this you gain control of the position and orientation of each airfoil, and when you have your wing done (the surface is generated with Multi selections surface or other command) you can change the length, root size, sweep angle, dihedral... by adjusting this commands, which can be useful when you want to simulate various wings designs. If you do this you can make a model for a general wing and them modify these parameters whenever you want to design a new wing, just like if you were using a parametric like Cad program. If you want to make designs for RC models I recommend other tools that can be used alongside with Catia, like OpenVSP, or XFLR5. This last one hast X-foil built in and you can simulate your wings in a much easier way than Abbacus from Catia. There is another program called Aeolus ASAP that its also parametric and can optimise your wing, but you only have a two weeks trial.

It sounds like, like me, you are looking for a solution such as SolidWorks's sketch block feature, which can be scaled, rotated, positioned, and copied to several sketch planes where they can be individually constrained and manipulated to existing features without disturbing their proportions. If you ever find Catia's equivalent to SW sketch blocks, I'm dying to know...