XFOIL

XFOIL is an interactive program for the design and analysis of subsonic isolated airfoils. Given the coordinates specifying the shape of a 2D airfoil, Reynolds and Mach numbers, XFOIL can calculate the pressure distribution on the airfoil and hence lift and drag characteristics. The program also allows inverse design - it will vary an airfoil shape to achieve the desired parameters.

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History

XFOIL was first developed by Mark Drela at MIT as a design tool for the MIT Daedalus project in the 1980s[1]. It was further developed in collaboration with Harold Youngren. The current version is 6.9. It has not been actively maintained since 2001. Despite its vintage, it is still widely used[2].

XFOIL is written in FORTRAN.

Similar Programs

A successor to XFOIL called XFLR5 was written and is actively maintained by Andre Deperrois, principally for use on model aircraft design. It is written in C++.

An unrelated program called JavaFoil may be used for similar analysis. It is written in Java.

References

  1. ^ http://web.mit.edu/aeroastro/news/magazine/aeroastro-no3/2006drela.html
  2. ^ http://www.aoe.vt.edu/~mason/Mason_f/MRsoft.html

External links