The determination of an aircraft?s mass properties is critical during its conceptual design phase. Obtaining reliable mass property information early in the design of an aircraft can prevent design mistakes that can be extremely costly further along in the development process.

In this paper, two methods are presented in order to automatically calculate the mass properties of aircraft structural components. The first method set forth calculates the mass properties of homogenous solids represented by polyhedral surface geometry. A newly developed method for calculating the mass properties of thin shell objects, given the same type of geometric representation, is derived and explained. Both of these methods apply to polyhedral geometry, which in many cases is used to approximate NURBS (Non-Uniform Rational B-Spline) surface geometry. This type of approximate representation is typically available in design software since this geometric format is conducive to graphically rendering three-dimensional geometry.