OpenMDAO / OpenMDAO/Aviary

Add an Excess Fuel Output to Dashboard for FLOPS Missions

Open
#828 2 comments 0 reactions 1 assignee View on GitHub

@cmbenne3 is already working on this.

Since Aug 20, 2025.

Dominant language
Python
Stars
287
Forks
140
Avg merge
6d 14h
Merged PRs (30d)
18

Description

Desired capability or behavior.

It is currently possible to execute and optimize an aircraft sizing mission where the Aircraft.Fuel.TOTAL_CAPACITY < MIssion.Design.FUEL_MASS. Legacy FLOPS was also able to do this, and had a variable 'EXSFUL' (Excess Fuel) that would show up in the output file -ve and with a warning message to the user if this condition was triggered.
I think we should add this to aviary, printing a message to the command line and adding a flag in the dashboard to show that although the optimization problem was solved the results may not be representative of a physical aircraft.

Aviary has no capability to set the Aircraft.Fuel.TOTAL_CAPACITY based on the fuel required for the design mission. This would be a nice to have feature as currently it is very easy to not specify enough inputs in the .csv for the fuel_capacity_group subsystems which will result in undefined circular references:

Image

It is currently important to set either total_capacity or (fuselage_fuel_capacity and auxiliary_fuel_capacity) in the input file, otherwise these circular references will occur.

The ability to feedback Mission.Design.FUEL_MASS into Aircraft.Fuel.TOTAL_CAPACITY would replicate the IFUFU=1 FLOPS behavior.

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

No response

Associated Bug Report

No response

Contributor guide

No contributing guide indexed for this repository

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Assessment

This issue has not been assessed yet.

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.