XFOIL

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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. It is released under the GNU GPL.

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 6.99, released in December 2013. Despite its vintage, it is still widely used.[2]

XFOIL is written in FORTRAN.

Similar Programs

  • XFOIL was traduced to the C++ language and integrated in the program XFLR5, principally for use on model aircraft design.
  • An unrelated program called JavaFoil may be used for similar analysis. It is written in Java.
  • Vortexje is an independent panel method implementation in 3D.

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

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