A STUDY ON THE LOW REYNOLDS NUMBER AIRFOILS FOR THE DESIGN OF THREE DIMENSIONAL WING

3차원 날개 설계를 위한 저레이놀즈수 에어포일에 대한 연구

In this study, a generic airfoil designed by the inverse method was evaluated with several candidate airfoils as a first step. Each airfoil was compared with respect to aerodynamic performance to meet the requirement of HALE(high altitude long endurance) aircraft. The second step was to optimize the candidate airfoil using the couple of optimization formulations to down select an optimum airfoil. For the analysis of low Reynolds number 2D flow, Drela's MSES was used. After comparing the aerodynamic results, the best airfoil was chosen to construct the baseline 3D wing. The Navier-Stokes code was used to evaluate the overall aerodynamic performance of designed wing with other wings. The results show that the designed wing has the best performance compared with other wings.