Assignment

3 Design of an airfoil
Academic year: 2017-2018

Requirements
• Personal or group task: Personal
• Minimum number of pages (excluding Title page and program listings): 6
• Font size: 10 – 12

Modern airfoils can be designed using inverse methods and optimization techniques. In this
assignment the task is to design an improved airfoil using the analysis and design program
XFOIL. You may either use the mixed inverse design method of XFOIL (Option 1) to find an airfoil
with enhanced lift/drag ratio manually or apply your own optimization technique (Option 2).

Note: When discussing XFOIL results please do not use screen prints as they are hardly readable.
XFOIL allows you to quickly generate high quality postscript files (hence pdf).

Tasks
Select one of these two options.

Option 1

Design an airfoil with improved aerodynamic characteristics by performing the following tasks:

• Select a cambered NACA 5 series airfoil (for example 23015) and determine its lift, drag
and pitching moment characteristics for a chord based Reynolds number of 1 million.
Determine the maximum lift /drag ratio and plot airfoil polars and discuss the results.
• Use the inverse airfoil design routines in XFOIL to manually design an airfoil with an
increased amount of laminar flow at the wing upper side to arrive at a higher lift/drag
ratio than found for the original airfoil. Explain the reasoning behind the changes to the
airfoil contour. Make sure that the original airfoil and the optimized airfoil have the
same relative thickness, 𝑡/𝑐!
• Plot the results and discuss the main findings.
• In your report also provide information on the steps you took that led to the improved
airfoil.
• Compare the characteristics (polars) of this airfoil with a typical 6-series airfoil (with the
same thickness) based on results found in open literature or your own calculation and
discuss what airfoil might have the best performance taking into account the pitching
moment behaviour.
Option 2

Design an airfoil with improved aerodynamic characteristics by performing the following tasks:

• Select a cambered NACA 5 series airfoil (for example 23015) and determine its lift, drag
and pitching moment characteristics for a chord based Reynolds number of 1 million.
Determine the maximum lift /drag ratio and plot airfoil polars and discuss the results.
Use a convenient PARSEC or CST airfoil description (for more information: see Internet)
of this airfoil and compare its aerodynamics characteristics with the original airfoil. Plot
and discuss the results.
• Write a MatLab script and apply an appropriate MatLab optimization routine to change
the airfoil shape to design and airfoil with a higher lift/drag ratio than the original
PARSEC/CST airfoil for the same design lift coefficient. Maintain the thickness of the
original airfoil to ensure equal structural characteristics.
• Discuss the calculation procedure and the calculation results.
• Add the listing of your Matlab script to the document (not part of the page count).