Publication Date:
2011-08-24
Description:
Since its early beginnings, NASA has been actively involved in the design and testing of airfoil sections for a wide variety of applications. Recently a set of programs has been developed to smooth and scale arbitrary airfoil coordinates. The smoothing program, AFSMO, utilizes both least-squares polynomial and least-squares cubic-spline techniques to iteratively smooth the second derivatives of the y-axis airfoil coordinates with respect to a transformed x-axis system which unwraps the airfoil and stretches the nose and trailing-edge regions. The corresponding smooth airfoil coordinates are then determined by solving a tridiagonal matrix of simultaneous cubic-spline equations relating the y-axis coordinates and their corresponding second derivatives. The camber and thickness distribution of the smooth airfoil are also computed. The scaling program, AFSCL, may then be used to scale the thickness distribution generated by the smoothing program to a specified maximum thickness. Once the thickness distribution has been scaled, it is combined with the camber distribution to obtain the final scaled airfoil contour. The airfoil smoothing and scaling programs are written in FORTRAN IV for batch execution and have been implemented on a CDC CYBER 170 series computer with a central memory requirement of approximately 70K (octal) of 60 bit words. Both programs generate plotted output via CALCOMP type plotting calls. These programs were developed in 1983.
Keywords:
AERODYNAMICS
Type:
LAR-13132
Format:
text
