It is very efficient and has been successfully applied at Reynolds numbers from 3104 to 5107.

A compressibility correction to the velocity distributions, which is valid as long as the local flow is not supersonic, has been incorporated into the code. The code is available, for a fee, in North America exclusively from Mark D. Maughmer6. If you are not ready to design your own airfoil, you are recommended to select a proper airfoil from the previously designed and published airfoil sections. Two reliable airfoil resources are NACA and Eppler. The details of Eppler airfoils have been published in Reference 1. NACA airfoils have been published in a book published by Abbott and Von Donehoff (Ref. 2). The book has been published in 1950s, but still reprinted and available in almost every aerospace related library. Both references present the airfoil coordinates plus pressure distribution and a few other graphs such as Cl, Cd, and Cm for a range angle of attacks. Eppler airfoil names begin with the letter E followed by three numbers. More details on NACA airfoils will be presented in Section 5.3.4. A regular flight operation consists of take off, climb, cruise, turn, maneuver, descent, approach and landing. Basically, the airfoils optimum function is in cruise, that an aircraft spend much of its flight time in this flight phase. At a cruising flight, lift (L) is equal to aircraft weight (W), and drag (D) is equal to engine thrust (T). Thus the wing must produce sufficient lift coefficient, while drag coefficient must be minimum. Both of these coefficients are mainly coming from airfoil section. Thus two governing equations for a cruising flight are:
L D W T 1 UV 2 SC L 2 1 UV 2 SC D 2 mg nTmax

(5.1) (jet engine) (prop-driven engine) (5.2)

1 UV 2 SC D 2

nK P Pmax VC

(5.3)

The equation 5.2 is for an aircraft with jet engine, but equation 5.3 is for an aircraft with prop-driven engine. The variable n ranges between 0.6 to 0.9. It means that only a partial engine throttle is used in a cruising flight and maximum engine power or engine thrust is not employed. The exact value for n will be determined in later design steps. For the airfoil initial design, it is suggested to use 0.75. The maximum engine power or engine thrust is only used during take-off or when cruising with maximum speed. Since a major criterion for airfoil design is to satisfy cruising flight requirements, equations 1 through 3 are used in airfoil design as explained later in this section. In the following section, the wing airfoil selection procedure is described.

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Wing Design

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