bflynt
Member
Often the topic of Airfoil selection comes up on this and other forums. It seems people are always trying to find the right airfoil for their application based on existing airfoil data.
Is there a reason why an inverse design program is not used for airfoil selection? By this I mean software where you input the desired Cl, Cm, etc. and then ask the program to determine an airfoil shape to minimize Cd given your constraints. Taking it a step further the optimization can optimize for a range of flight conditions (multi-point optimization). I believe XFoil has some of this capability and I know many commercial and research codes have this implemented. It seems that selecting an existing airfoil is limiting yourself to >30 year old airfoils that were designed to meet someone else's goals.
I come from the research side of aerospace (specifically CFD & optimization) so I'm interested in the responses the practitioners have to my query.
Bryan
Is there a reason why an inverse design program is not used for airfoil selection? By this I mean software where you input the desired Cl, Cm, etc. and then ask the program to determine an airfoil shape to minimize Cd given your constraints. Taking it a step further the optimization can optimize for a range of flight conditions (multi-point optimization). I believe XFoil has some of this capability and I know many commercial and research codes have this implemented. It seems that selecting an existing airfoil is limiting yourself to >30 year old airfoils that were designed to meet someone else's goals.
I come from the research side of aerospace (specifically CFD & optimization) so I'm interested in the responses the practitioners have to my query.
Bryan
