avl-aero-tables

What is AVL?

AVL (Athena Vortex Lattice) is a vortex lattice method (VLM) solver for aerodynamic and flight-dynamic analysis of fixed-wing aircraft. It is developed and maintained by Mark Drela and Harold Youngren at MIT and is widely used in preliminary design for its speed and accuracy at low computational cost.

Important

Before using this wrapper, read the upstream AVL documentation. Understanding AVL’s geometry format, reference quantities, and output conventions is essential for setting up runs correctly and interpreting results.

• AVL User Primer [.pdf] — start here; covers geometry input, run cases, and output quantities

• MIT AVL Homepage — source code, full user guide, and release notes

What is AVL Aero Tables?

A Python package that drives AVL programmatically and returns structured aerodynamic lookup tables.

The key idea: AVL is normally operated interactively — you type commands into its terminal menu, load a hand-written .run file, and step through each flight condition manually. avl-aero-tables bypasses this entirely. For each sweep it generates two input files and writes them to a timestamped subdirectory of 📁 out/ alongside the results, so previous runs are never overwritten:

• reset.run — an AVL run-case file in AVL’s native .run format, with all flight conditions zeroed to provide a clean starting state for every point

• sweep.cmd — the full AVL command script: LOAD, OPER, per-case alpha / beta / deflection settings, st save commands, and Quit

It then feeds sweep.cmd to AVL’s stdin via subprocess — AVL reads it exactly as it would a human typing commands, but at machine speed, across hundreds of (alpha, beta, control deflection) combinations in a single Python call.

Note

Because reset.run and sweep.cmd live alongside the .st outputs in each timestamped directory, the full inputs to AVL are always on disk. You can inspect them to understand exactly what was sent, or replay any run manually from a terminal with avl < out/bd/2026-05-15-143022/sweep.cmd.

Five functions cover the full workflow — from reading a geometry file through plotting a finished aero database:

from avl_aero_tables import avl_fileread, avl_fileplot, avl_sweep, aero_filewrite, aero_fileplot

geom    = avl_fileread("examples/bd.avl")           # parse geometry
fig     = avl_fileplot(geom)                        # four view of geometry
results = avl_sweep("examples/bd.avl", alpha, beta) # run AVL sweep
aero    = aero_filewrite(results)                   # build aero lookup tables
figs    = aero_fileplot(aero)                       # plot aero tables

See Installation to get up and running, then Usage for the full walkthrough.