A Strategy for Airfoils Selection in the Design of Customized Aircraft Models for Flight Simulation Testing

Abstract

One of the pivotal aspects in aircraft design and manufacturing is the definition of airfoils. This activity can be addressed with software such as Plane Maker and Airfoil Maker, two applications bundled with the X-Plane flight simulator, which allows the design of airfoils or use of predefined ones to build aircraft lifting elements. However, such airfoils can only be selected from a folder included with X-Plane, where, as stated, either default or custom airfoils designed with Airfoil Maker can be found. The design of airfoils using this program is done based on their desired aerodynamic characteristics, which is a tedious and time consuming task if they are meant to be designed for the whole range of angles of attack. For this reason, designers prefer using the provided default airfoils in a preliminary design, but choosing them arbitrary is far from a correct decision due to the variation in the aerodynamic performance. In this article we present a strategy for selecting suitable default airfoils to build the aircraft lifting elements in Plane Maker such that their aerodynamic performance is not considerably affected. The proposed strategy consist on conducting a geometric comparison between software-provided default airfoils and user-defined airfoils in order to select the ones with the best aerodynamic performance for a specific aircraft. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed strategy, we used the XFLR5 software to compare the aerodynamic behavior of same-shape wings generated by similar airfoils in a fixed wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicle.