5: The Plane as a Surfaced Model

5: The Plane as a Surfaced Model
Friday 19th August 2011

While almost quarter of a billion measurements were taken in the scanning of the aircraft, the ultimate output of the process was far simpler - an accurate CAD model of the aircraft. This was reverse engineering on a grand scale - the CAD file created will be used for CFD, and then to cut the production moulds for the aircraft's composite panels.

The individual scans were combined into a single point-cloud model of the aircraft. This was reduced to eliminate overlap between the scans, but was still far too detailed a model to perform CFD analysis on.

A 3rd party software package (Rapidform) was then used to "surface" the point cloud, effectively converting it back into a CAD file. This process was far more labour intensive than the scanning.

The Quartz scanners are compatible with many major software packages, including Polyworks, Geomagic, Spatial Analyser, Leios and many more - in addition to CAD packages such as CATIA, SolidWorks and so forth.

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