Multiple Element Airfoil Design
 

Hi guys,

I am looking for an alternative to CFD to design a multiple-element airfoil. I was thinking about a coupled inviscid Panel Method with a Boundary Layer solver.

I already know several codes like Javafoil, but I would like to know if there are other open-source codes.

Thanks in advance and best,

Andrea

I am not sure about open source. The code is very doable. I wrote one for single airfoils in grad school, I can't imagine that extending it to multiple elements is very difficult.

Not sure what your goals are, but you could probably link any given software with a user-code. I know there are plenty of examples of people integrating Xfoil into Matlab, for instance. You might be able to take something like XFLR5 and write a Matlab/Python script to get the functionality that you need. Otherwise, you are probably stuck coding it yourself. It's a fun academic exercise, but totally pointless if you are trying to do real engineering. No sense wasting time creating tools that are already available and can be readily adapted.

Ok thank you. And did you know any other free software for 2D multiple element airfoils? I already know Javafoil but in my opinion it is not so reliable.

XFLR5 and XFOIL immediately come to mind as far as free codes go.

Ok but they did not manage multiple-element airfoil such this:

https://history.nasa.gov/SP-468/p272a.jpg

Javafoil can handle these airfoils but it's not very reliable. Anyone knows other free software?

Dear andrea,

I am also looking for multi-element 2D solver. Did you find or obtain any code so far?

MSES is the multi-element XFOIL, although you would have to ask if getting a free copy is possible