TWO AIRFOIL SECTIONS DESIGNED FOR LOW REYNOLDS NUMBER

Abstract

McMasters and Henderson presented an overview of a process by which an airfoil can be tailored to the requirements of a specific application by the use of true inverse viscous flow computational methods. While they presented a comprehensive overview of this synthesis process, the examples presented were of a preliminary nature demonstrating trends rather than defining specific new airfoil sections. The present paper is an extension of McMasters and Henderson describing in detail two airfoil sections recently designed by this methodology. Both sections were designed to operate at low Reynolds number, are somewhat unconventional, and clearly demonstrate the capabilities of the present synthesis approach. While both sections described are single element airfoils (i.e., they possess neither slotted leading or trailing edge high lift devices), the present rnethodoiogy is fully capable of handling these more complex multi-element cases as well.