Airfoil Analysis

[B-ROB]

Is Xfoil/XFLR5 still the tools of choice for analyzing airfoils? I assume OpenVSP does not have that capability?

[Rob McDonald]

OpenVSP does not have any airfoil analysis capability.

XFLR5 is a XFoil/AVL mashup. I don't know that it will do a pure 2D analysis.

Lots of people still use XFoil.

Rob

On Mon, Jan 1, 2018 at 2:46 PM, 'B-ROB' via OpenVSP
<ope...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
> Is Xfoil/XFLR5 still the tools of choice for analyzing airfoils? I assume OpenVSP does not have that capability?
>

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[Felix Finger]

VSPaero offers a panel code and with the CP slicer function you can get chordwise pressure distributions, but I would not use that to analyse airfoils.

XFLR5 is still my go-to tool for subsonic airfoil analysis.
For airfoil design I find Xoptfoil a handy tool: https://sourceforge.net/projects/xoptfoil/

Regards, Felix

[Rob McDonald]

I also noticed that one of NASA's production CFD codes CFL3D is
available as open source on GitHub. CFL3D has a 2D mode that should
run very fast as the cell count will be way down.

https://github.com/nasa/CFL3D

It is a block structured code that also has overset capabilities -- a
2D elliptic grid generator is a pretty simple thing to put together
for single-element airfoils. There really 'ought' to be one available
already that will do the job.

If someone wanted to take the lead on stringing these things together,
I could probably put some time into improving the airfoil output of
OpenVSP to suit this kind of analysis. It is on my to-do list anyway.

Rob

[corp...@gmail.com]

Rob,

what about the idea to integrate Xfoil through a plug-in in OpenVSP ?

 I'm not a programmer, therefore i don't know the specific problems connected to such integration, but given the wide use of Xfoil in many aero-design communities, maybe it could be worth .

For example , even if VSP is a 3D code, CP_slice could benefit from comparison with 2D Cp curves derived fromXfoil; beside, any modification of the airfoil by Xfoil with its inverse design mode, could be immediately
loaded in OpenVSP geometry allowing new VSP analysis.

Corrado

[Rob McDonald]

The airfoil output I will need to do will of course be able to feed a
tool like XFoil as well.

I don't know about going for a more tightly integrated plugin -- there
would be some advantages, but there are plenty of advantages to
keeping the tools separate as well.

There has been a discussion of developing a plugin capability for
OpenVSP so you don't have to be set up with a compiler to add some of
this kind of functionality. However, there is only so much time to
take projects on...

Rob