XFOIL 6.9 User Primer
THE last update 30 Nov 2001
| Mark Drela, MIT Aero & Astro | Harold Youngren, Aerocraft, Inc. |
General Description
XFOIL is an interactive program for the design and analysis of subsonic isolated airfoils. It consists of a collection of menu-driven routines which perform various useful functions such as:
- Viscous (or inviscid) analysis of an existing airfoil, allowing
- forced or free transition
- transitional separation bubble(s)
- limited trailing edge separation
- lift and drag predictions just beyond CLmax
- Karman-Tsien compressibility correction
- forced or free transition
- Airfoil design and redesign by interactive specification of a surface speed distribution via screen cursor or mouse. Two such facilities are implemented.
- Full-Inverse, based on a complex-mapping formulation
- Mixed-Inverse, an extension of XFOIL’s basic panel method Full-inverse allows multi-point design, while Mixed-inverse allows relatively strict geometry control over parts of the airfoil.
- Airfoil redesign by interactive specification of new geometric parameters such as
- new max thickness and/or camber
- new LE radius
- new TE thickness
- new camber line via geometry specification
- new camber line via loading change specification
- flap deflection
- explicit contour geometry (via screen cursor)
- Blending of airfoils
- Drag polar calculation with fixed or varying Reynolds and/or Mach numbers.
- Writing and reading of airfoil geometry and polar save files
- Plotting of geometry, pressure distributions, and polars (Versaplot-derivative plot package used)
XFOIL is best suited for use on a good workstation. A high-end PC is also effective, but must run Unix to support the X-Windows graphics. The source code of XFOIL is Fortran 77. The plot library also uses a few C routines for the X-Windows interface.