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Airfoil polars management is one of the coolest
news in Profili 2.0.
The capability to generate airfoil and then draw the graphs is one of
the most requested by the users of Profili. But the solution wasn't
simple.
I haven't got the know-how to write a good aerodynamic algorithm and so I
planned to use Profili as a graph interface to XFoil, a famous
freeware software written by Mark Drela and well known to many modellers.
XFoil has a very good computing accuracy, but it isn't user friendly
application:
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It's rather difficult to use for an inexperienced user
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The processing time is rather long because of the complex calculation
it performs
- The parameters to generate polars must be fine tuned by the
user, or often the polar may not be generated
- You yourself must find the airfoil coordinates, XFoil does not have its’ own database
So I decided to develop Profili like a driver for XFoil, so that it
could work silently in the background.
And I have also integrated a way to hold computed polars in the database so that graph drawings are very fast.
And, at last, I inserted in the database the pre-processed polars of all
the airfoils for 20 different Re (from 30,000 to 500,000).
You can enter new airfoils or Re, and they will be calculated on the fly or with a 'nightime' processing.
I fully rewrote the graph drawing functions to integrate them well with Profili working desktop.
You can analyse and compare the polars in 3 different ways:
All the graphs may be viewed on video, zoomed and printed.
Click on the analysis list to have more info.
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