Airfoil - Advanced Fluid Mechanics Course Project
Project Objectives/Constraints:
Design, build, test, and simulate the performance of an airfoil of the teamβs selection
The design must be manufactured on a short time scale
The final fabricated airfoil must fit within the university wind tunnel
Design
As the keen observer may notice, the airfoilβs design was largely inspired by the Tesla Cybertruck profile. Careful steps were taken to ensure that dimensions were kept proportional while scaling the airfoil down to size. The airfoil had to be small enough to fit within the wind tunnel at several pre-defined angles of attack while also not being so close to the edges of the wind tunnel that edge effects impacted the experimental data.
Aerodynamic Performance Analysis
Once fully modeled, the airfoil was studied within the SolidWorks Flow Simulation add-in. Pressure cut plots, velocity streamlines, and lift/drag force plots were produced for several different attack angle configurations so that they could later be compared to the experimental data collected by a real-life wind tunnel study.
Fabrication
Once enough simulation data was collected, the airfoil was ready to be manufactured. It was decided that additive manufacturing would be the fabrication method chosen for the project, as it was cheap, , and fell within the expertise of the designer. Post-processing was performed to smooth the surface of manufactured airfoil and remove any layer lines; by doing this, the experimental aerodynamic performance would more closely align with the results produced by the Computational Fluid Dynamics study.