Source: NASA
During the late 1920s and into the 1930s, the NACA developed a series of thoroughly tested airfoils and devised a numerical designation for each airfoil — a four digit number that represented the airfoil section's critical geometric properties. By 1929, Langley had developed this system to the point where the numbering system was complemented by an airfoil cross-section, and the complete catalog of 78 airfoils appeared in the NACA's annual report for 1933. Engineers could quickly see the peculiarities of each airfoil shape, and the numerical designator ("NACA 2415," for instance) specified camber lines, maximum thickness, and special nose features. These figures and shapes transmitted the sort of information to engineers that allowed them to select specific airfoils for desired performance characteristics of specific aircraft.
In this tutorial you will learn to simulate a NACA Airfoil (4412) using ANSYS Fluent. First, we will import the points of the NACA profile and then we will generate the mesh using an unstructured mesh in Ansys Meshing. You can download the file in the following link.
Ansys CFX – NACA 4412 (Structured Mesh)
The NACA four-digit wing sections define the profile by:
First digit describing maximum camber as percentage of the chord.
Second digit describing the distance of maximum camber from the airfoil leading edge in tenths of the chord.
OpenFOAM vs ANSYS CFX
OpenFOAM is the free, open source CFD software developed primarily by OpenCFD Ltd since 2004. It has a large user base across most areas of engineering and science, from both commercial and academic organisations.
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