Ahmed A.A.

Hashem
| Turbine Blade Design |

Comparison of Drag
Polars of 2 Airfoils
using XFOIL
Abstract:
In this report; a CFD analysis for two airfoils is conducted using XFoil software and the drag,
lift and drag polar curves are obtained at different angles of attack for each airfoil.

The relation and graphs between the angle of attack and these coefficients are constructed
from the study results and compared with the experimental results in data bases.

For each of the two airfoils (NACA 0006, NACA 2412), the airfoil shape data is loaded and a
subsonic flow operating at a Reynolds number of 6.56E+06 is presented over the airfoil at
various angles of attack.

Procedure
1. Type the airfoil name naca 0006 to load its data from the programs database.
2. Change the mood of from XFOIL to Operi by typing oper
3. Type visc to change the mode from inviscid, which is default to viscous.
4. It will ask for the Reynolds number enter 6.56e6
5. The mode will be now Operv instead of Operi, since we changed to viscous.
6. You can type aseq -2 8 1 in the command prompt. This enters a sequence of angels
of attack to the program. If you press enter, the program will draw the Cp over the
cord length for the upper and lower surface of the airfoil for each angle of attack,
starting from -2 degrees till 8 degrees with one degree step. It will also display the Cl,
Cd and Cm at every angle of attack as shown in fig.1.

7. If the solution doesnt converge or if the curves appear to be rough, this is because of
the low number of iterations in the solution. To fix this, you can either type ! the

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 exclamation mark, which will trigger the program to conduct more iterations, or type
iter and the number of iterations you like then reinter the aseq command again.
8. Now we change from Cp(x) to polar graphs by typing seqp
9. To start accumulating and storing polar data type pacc
10. It will ask you for a name to the storage file
11. You can show the details of your polar file by typing psum
12. Now you can enter the aseq command again, but this time it will produce the polar
curves as shown in fig.2.

13. Repeating the same procedure for the airfoil NACA2412 we have the results shown in
fig.3&4.

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Experimental data
For each airfoil, the lift drag and moment coefficients were calculated and the pressure and
velocity contours were drawn for about 5 or 6 angles of attack. And the results are shown
below.

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Discussion
After obtaining the results above, they were tabulated and the coefficients curves vs the
angle of attack were drawn and compared with those from the experiments in the data
bases. The graphs and comparisons are listed below.

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 Cl
CFD Results Reference data Error
%
AF 0006:
0 2.36E-03 0 -
The results
3 3.30E-01 0.3 9.961
come in a good
match 5 4.98E-01 0.5 0.3 with those
in the 8 8.63E-01 0.8 7.85 references
with maximum
error about 10% in the linear part. Calculating the slope of the curve after converting the
degrees to radians to compare with theoretical predictions of the thin air foil theory.

( 0.8628220.498466 )180
slope= =6.95 2 . It was found that the slope is very close to
( 85 )
the theoretical one for a symmetric airfoil.

NACA 0006 Cd/

As for the drag and moment coefficients, both agree to a good extent with the reference
data.

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 Cd
CFD Referenc
Results e data
0 5.35E-03 0.005

3 6.27E-03 0.0057

5 1.53E-02 0.007

8 2.55E-02 0.009

1 1.73E-01 0.012
0

NACA 0006 Cd/

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 Cm
CFD reference
Results data
0 -8.52E-05 0

3 -8.22E-02 0

5 -1.26E-01 -0.03

8 -2.21E-01 -0.1

10 -2.67E-01 -0.2

AF 2412:

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 NACA 2412 Cl/

NACA 2412 Cd/

Cl Cd Cm
CFD Reference CFD Reference CFD Reference
Results data Results data Results data
0 2.15E-01 0.2 0 6.64E-03 0.0065 0 -1.09E-02 -0.03
- -7.33E- -0.05 - 6.73E-03 0.0067 - 6.15E-02 -0.04
2. 02 2. 2.
5 5 5
-5 -3.22E- -0.28 -5 7.55E-03 0.007 -5 1.38E-01 -0.05
01

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5 7.65E-01 0.75 5 8.95E-03 0.0077 5 -1.46E-01 -0.035
10 1.29E+0 1.28 10 1.57E-02 0.013 10 -2.41E-01 -0.03
0

Conclusion
Using CFD analysis for airfoils is a powerful way for predicting the aerodynamic
characteristics with good accuracy. In this study, the results not only show great consistency
with the reference data but also accuracy with respect to theoretical predictions by the thin
air foil theory. Which emphasizes the fact that CFD analysis is an accurate and precise way
of calculating aerodynamic parameters of airfoils, not to mention being way cheaper than
experiments.

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References
1. CFD Analysis of an Aerofoil, Karna S. Patel, Saumil B. Patel, Utsav B. Patel, Prof. Ankit
P. Ahuja
2. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) Analysis of NACA 0012 Airfoil, The City College
of New York, Zhexuan Wang, Mostafa Al Mahmud
3. EXPERIMENTAL AND CFD ANALYSIS OF AIRFOIL AT LOW REYNOLDS NUMBER,
Chandrakant Sagat, Pravin Mane1 and B S Gawali1
4. www.airfoiltools.com/airfoil

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