The rotorcraft design process is a continuously evolving field of research that incorporates a number of software programs. An accurate airfoil table is critical in the design and testing process for rotorcraft. With multiple flow solvers available and flow conditions of multirotor UAM vehicles potentially covering a wide range of Reynolds and Mach numbers, a documented approach for developing airfoil tables is needed. Using benchmark data from legacy airfoil tables and wind tunnel tests for comparison, simulations for a comprehensive test matrix could guide rotorcraft design engineers in generating their own airfoil tables using the XFOIL and OVERFLOW solvers. The motivation for this study is to investigate flow solver features to develop a best practices document for airfoil table generation. The study uses the OVERFLOW and XFOIL flow solvers, coupled with the airfoil table generator AFTGen, to analyze three airfoils for a specific Reynolds numbers flow regime and provide details on how well each flow solver performs within a specific angle of attack range, Mach number range, Reynolds number range, and in different flow conditions, such as turbulent and transitional flow. OVERFLOW analyses in AFTGen for fully turbulent and transition flow are compared with XFOIL results and experimental test data for the section lift, section drag, and pressure coefficients. XFOIL ultimately yields results that are accurate within the linear angle of attack range and below a Mach number of 0.4 but tends to overpredict lift and underpredict drag unless the flow is in the compressible regime. XFOIL cannot accurately model stall and post-stall conditions due to the nature of the solver. This is evident in nearly every case run with XFOIL, where the linear range is usually predicted acceptably and the lift coefficient is overpredicted as the stall angle of attack is approached (with the exception being the generally poor correlation with most of the SSC-A09 cases). OVERFLOW is limited at low Mach numbers, and appears to perform best at Mach numbers of 0.4 and above. The exploration of airfoil table generation using XFOIL and OVERFLOW yielded moderately successful results for the NACA 0012 airfoil, reasonably good results for the RC(4)-10 airfoil, and less accurate results for the SSC-A09 airfoil.


    Access

    Access via TIB

    Check availability in my library


    Export, share and cite



    Title :

    Exploring Airfoil Table Generation using XFOIL and OVERFLOW


    Contributors:

    Conference:

    Aeromechanics for Advanced Vertical Flight Technical Meeting, Transformative Vertical Flight 2022 ; 2022 ; San Jose, CA, US


    Type of media :

    Conference paper


    Type of material :

    No indication


    Language :

    English




    Flow Curvature Effects for VAWT: a Review of Virtual Airfoil Transformations and Implementation in XFOIL

    van der Horst, Sander / van de Wiel, Jelmer E. / Simao Ferreira, Carlos et al. | AIAA | 2016


    PALMO: An OVERFLOW Machine Learning Airfoil Performance Database

    Cornelius, Jason / Peters, Nicholas / Aagren, Tove S. et al. | AIAA | 2025


    Airfoil Transonic Flow Buffet Calculations Using the OVERFLOW 2 Flow Solver

    Thomas, J. / Dowell, E. / American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics | British Library Conference Proceedings | 2011