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Old 26th Jan 2005, 00:45
  #16 (permalink)  
CRAN
 
Join Date: Mar 2002
Location: UK
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Zeeoo,

There is, but its not simple! To calculate the behaviour of the aerodynamics around any given shape for a viscous, compressible, unsteady flow you need to solve the Navier-Stokes equations. The implementation of a 2D Navier-Stokes solver for aerofoils, involves about 100-200 pages of code depending on its complexity. Once you have your code you will need to solve the equations on a suitable computational grid - you will need grid generation software to produce the grid also.

Once you have a code and a grid for the aerofoil, you can expect the calculation to take about half a day to accurately compute lift and drag, for a single design point on a desktop PC. (Less if you accept lower accuracy.)

If you accept lower accuracy you could also choose to solve reduced forms of the equations, which may, for example, limit you to attached incompressible flows. For this I suggest you do a search for XFOIL on the internet, it's free and should get you started! Plus it runs much, much quicker!

Incidentally, before you get too excited, the best practical useful methods available today (Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stokes Solvers) cannot accurately predict Clmax, i.e. the static stall point. Nor can they predict drag particularly well! It takes a very long time to learn how to tease useful engineering data out of these methods and if not applied very carefully will produce nonsense for results! Like I said...it's not easy!

Hope this helps
CRAN

PS: If I were designing a recreational gyrocopter I probably wouldn't be attempting to design new aerofoils - I would use established aerofoils for which there is lots of EXPERIMENTAL test data over a broad range of conditions. Perhaps the NACA0012... Like Dave said 'The Theory of Wing Sections' by Abbott and Von Doenhoff is your best bet.
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