ALBERT

Description: The Transonic Airfoil analysis computer code, TAIR, was developed to employ a fast, fully implicit algorithm to solve the conservative full-potential equation for the steady transonic flow field about an arbitrary airfoil immersed in a subsonic free stream. The full-potential formulation is considered exact under the assumptions of irrotational, isentropic, and inviscid flow. These assumptions are valid for a wide range of practical transonic flows typical of modern aircraft cruise conditions. The primary features of TAIR include: a new fully implicit iteration scheme which is typically many times faster than classical successive line overrelaxation algorithms; a new, reliable artifical density spatial differencing scheme treating the conservative form of the full-potential equation; and a numerical mapping procedure capable of generating curvilinear, body-fitted finite-difference grids about arbitrary airfoil geometries. Three aspects emphasized during the development of the TAIR code were reliability, simplicity, and speed. The reliability of TAIR comes from two sources: the new algorithm employed and the implementation of effective convergence monitoring logic. TAIR achieves ease of use by employing a "default mode" that greatly simplifies code operation, especially by inexperienced users, and many useful options including: several airfoil-geometry input options, flexible user controls over program output, and a multiple solution capability. The speed of the TAIR code is attributed to the new algorithm and the manner in which it has been implemented. Input to the TAIR program consists of airfoil coordinates, aerodynamic and flow-field convergence parameters, and geometric and grid convergence parameters. The airfoil coordinates for many airfoil shapes can be generated in TAIR from just a few input parameters. Most of the other input parameters have default values which allow the user to run an analysis in the default mode by specifing only a few input parameters. Output from TAIR may include aerodynamic coefficients, the airfoil surface solution, convergence histories, and printer plots of Mach number and density contour maps. The TAIR program is written in FORTRAN IV for batch execution and has been implemented on a CDC 7600 computer with a central memory requirement of approximately 155K (octal) of 60 bit words. The TAIR program was developed in 1981.