2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Two-dimensional infinite airfoils are a fundamental concept in Aerodynamics and Aircraft design. Studying airfoils provides an estimate of the lift force and drag force for an aircraft. The Wright Brothers were revolutionary in their use of wind tunnels to design airfoils that helped provide the first powered flights at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. The path forward from then on was to use wind tunnels to study fundamental airfoils shapes for use on aircraft and the different shaped airfoils were categorized and studied by the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), the precursor to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). For instance, to this day, we still talk about the NACA 0012 airfoil. However, rarely does a university have all the wind-tunnel resources necessary to educate their students about all the different flow regimes from incompressible to compressible effects, nor the means to make or purchase all the different shaped airfoil models. Fortunately, today various free software packages are available to give students a fundamental understanding of the effects of flow regimes on different attributes such as coefficient of lift and drag of airfoils. As part of an introductory aerospace engineering course, the students at the University of Denver are given a project to study the NACA 0012 airfoil in the incompressible and compressible flow regimes with JavaFoil, primarily a vortex panel method with add-on models for viscous and compressible effects. And, in addition, the students study the compressible flow regime with the ANSYS Fluent Student Version. In this project the students use the two software tools as computational wind tunnels where they study different angles of attack and flow conditions. Upon completion of their analysis, the students then compare their result with each method and with the known NACA Handbook values. This project thus provides a means for the students to synthesize the theory and concepts about aerodynamics taught in the first half of an introductory aerospace course by using a computational wind tunnel.