AGPS Applications

The Boeing Aero Grid and Paneling System (AGPS) is a unique surface geometry program that the company has kept under wraps for over 20 years. AGPS is now available outside Boeing through an agreement with the Calmar Research Corporation (see the Related Links page).

I have been fortunate to have access to AGPS through my former colleagues at Boeing and am able to do testing of each new version. Naturally, most of my home applications have usually involved sailing in some manner.

AGPS is unique in that not only is it a powerful interactive surface geometry program, it is also a programming language where the user can develop customized application packages to meet diverse needs.

The picture above is from a sailboat hull design package that I recently developed. The objective was to illustrate how AGPS could be used to move the traditional hull lines development task from the drawing board to the desktop computer. Tools were provided to allow a design to proceed from a few hull stations to a completely faired and smooth hull shape. Once a particular design is completed, it is then very easy to create derivative shapes by simply changing the deck and hull profile curves.

AGPS has been very useful in studying the shapes of sails. This is an AGPS rendering of my Ranger 23 flying a mainsail and spinnaker designed as an experiment for me by Sandy Goodall (see the Related Links page). Sandy used his SmSw6 sail design program to create the sail shapes which were input into AGPS. AGPS was then used to study the surface quality of the sails as designed.

AGPS has a number of tools for studying the smoothness of complex three-dimensional surfaces. Smoothness is obviously very important, not only in the design of aircraft surfaces, but in the design of our sails.

AGPS played a key part in the work involved in designing the new Star boat mast for the Spar Tech Company. See the Star Mast Design page and the Spar Tech Company site in the Related Links page.

AGPS was designed to prepare surface geometry data for Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) programs and to display the computed results. However, it also does a great job of displaying data from non-CFD sources such as position and speed vs. time data during a sailboat race as shown in the plot above. During the race a video camera was mounted on the back of my boat to record crew activity and to capture audio information. A GPS unit was running to record position and speed over the bottom as we sailed the course.

After the race the GPS data was downloaded to my computer and processed to produce a preliminary version of this plot. Final notes on the plot were then prepared by viewing the video tape. The track from the GPS was also displayed on a chart of the race course using a separate program, so together the track plot and the AGPS speed vs. time plot give a good history of the race for study and reference for future races.