An Overview of the Engineering Sketch Pad

The Engineering Sketch Pad (ESP) is a CAD-like system for the generation of geometric models for the analysis and design of complex configurations, such as aircraft. It is a feature-based, parametric solid modeler, that is freely available. A typical use of ESP is to generate the various views of a configuration that are required for multi-fidelity and multi-disciplinary models; these various views are typically linked to each other via ESP’s rich attribution that are applied to the entities in the boundary representations. A unique feature of ESP is that the geometry creation process has been fully differentiated, so that one knows the sensitivity of every part of the configuration with respect to the user-defined design parameters. Since its introduction in 2013, ESP has attracted a large user base of over 1000 users in more than 50 organizations and is used as the embedded geometry system in several mesh generation and analysis systems. Many of ESP’s enhancements, such as a collaboration environment and its integration with the Computational Aerospace Prototype Syntheses (CAPS) system have been documented elsewhere; this paper provides an overview of those enhancements in one place.