Hi All!

I have finally refined my Aerofoil Design Programme.

All in all, from preliminary sketches and masses of Calculus
and entering of formulae, it's been 6 months of hard work,
but well worth it!!

Besides minor changes in the Aerofoil design section,
INCEN Aerofoil Geometrics v2.1 now includes Aerodynamic
Glider and Sailplane Fuselage development.

It also auto generates full size coordinates for Fuselages,
Elliptical and Inverted Teardrop Formers.

I hope and trust that you find it helpful!

Ian

Hi Ian,

I'm impressed by your enthusiasm !

But...
How can you design airfoils only from a geometrical point of view ?
Where is the aerodynamics ?

-Paul

Paul- in reading the manual he runs the shapes through Xfoil or XFLR5 to analyse the shapes. INCEN is just a way of producing smoothed line shapes ready for testing in Xfoil or XFLR5.

Having played with spreadsheets a little I can only echo the comments about how dedicated you were on this project. There is CLEARLY a LOT of time involved in this effort.

My concern is that as you point out it is highly confusing to use at first glance. Also the variety of airfoils presented in the blueline boxes all seem to be darn close to the same to my eye.

As a "beta" format what you made is great. But to make it easier to use for Joe Average you need to hide a lot of the boxes and come up with a cleaner and more intuitive interface. Something that allows the user to alter the parameters more in line with normal airfoil parlance. Joe Average thinks more in terms of max thickness and %chord for the max thickness point and camber and %chord for the peak camber location. Then, if he thinks about it, comes the nose radius. Hiding a lot of the other stuff and perhaps designing slider controls for these variable values would do much to make the setup more user intuitive.

I noticed that the blue line graphic boxes also only update if I scroll them off the screen then back on again. It would be nice if there was a "Refresh" or "Update" or some other name button to force the blueline to update after changes are made.

I'd also make it so the user only sees one blueline box. I can't see a lot of gain in seeing a bunch of bluelines that only leads to confusion. Now on the other hand if each of the multiple blueline boxes were to include the thickness and location and camber value and location THAT would be another issue. Then I would most definetly leave the lot of them in place for the user to consider.

A macro to grab the final coordinate table of the desired result and present the user with a "Save as" selector box for creating the final .dat file would be nice as well. Again, the steps needed to get to a .dat file for use with Xfoil or XFLR5 is a bit of a stumbling block.

I also note in your presentation that you mention camber values from 3 to 6.5%. These seem very high for any sort of modern sailplane where 3 to 4% camber is something I would use on a calm summer evening floater that would never be expected to deal with more than about 5 to 7 mph of wind. Or a light STOL sort of parkflyer. Anything of 4% and more is suited more towards free flight models than to RC sailplanes. So some shift in emphasis to optimizing the 0 to 4% camber values would be a wise modification.

The high camber focus also explains why you're getting such nice max Cl ability in the examples. But you only get that at the cost of higher than optimum drag at the lower Cl's used for cruising and penetrating back upwind.