Remove ambiance dependency from OpenAeroStruct wing mass example#1216
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The OAStructures analysis component used the external ambiance package purely to compute speed of sound, density, and dynamic viscosity at a couple of altitudes. Aviary already ships an Atmosphere subsystem that provides the same properties from the same underlying atmosphere model, so pulling in a separate package for this was unnecessary. Replace the ambiance usage with a small helper that runs Aviary's Atmosphere group in a throwaway Problem to get the needed values, and drop ambiance from pyproject.toml, the installation guide, and the OpenAeroStruct example doc.
jkirk5
approved these changes
Jul 6, 2026
Kenneth-T-Moore
approved these changes
Jul 7, 2026
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Summary
The
OAStructuresanalysis component (used by the OpenAeroStruct external subsystem example) depended on the externalambiancepackage solely to compute speed of sound, density, and dynamic viscosity at two altitudes (cruise and sea level). Aviary already has its ownAtmospheresubsystem built on the same underlying atmosphere model, so this dependency was unnecessary.This PR replaces the
ambiance.Atmosphereusage with a small helper that runs Aviary'sAtmospheregroup inside a throwawayom.Problem, following the same pattern already used elsewhere in Aviary (e.g.aviary/utils/engine_deck_conversion.py) for one-off atmosphere property lookups outside of a mission ODE.ambianceis removed frompyproject.toml'sdevextra, the installation guide, and the OpenAeroStruct example notebook.I verified the two implementations agree closely at the test case's cruise altitude (11303.68 m) and sea level:
ambiance->[295.069, 340.294]m/s, Aviary ->[295.041, 340.261]m/sambiance->[0.348, 1.225]kg/m^3, Aviary ->[0.348, 1.225]kg/m^3Related Issues
Backwards incompatibilities
None. This only affects the internals of the OpenAeroStruct wing mass example subsystem; its inputs/outputs are unchanged.
ambianceis no longer required to run this example or its tests.AI Usage
None