A Class of Airfoils Designed for High Lift in Incompressible Flow

The problem studied is that of designing a single element airfoil which provides the maximum possible lift in an unseparated incompressible flow. First, an airfoil velocity distribution is defined and optimized using boundary-layer theory and the calculus of variations. The resulting velocity distribution is then used as an input for an inverse airfoil design program which provides the corresponding airfoil shape. Since there is no guarantee that an arbitrarily defined velocity distribution will yield a physically possible airfoil shape, some parametric adjustments in the optimized distributions are required in order to obtain realistic and practical airfoil geometries. Wind-tunnel tests of two different airfoils (one assuming a laminar rooftop and the other a turbulent rooftop) have been conducted and in both cases the results met the theoretically predicted performance; for example, the laminar section exhibited a low drag range of CD — 0.0085 from CL - 0.8 to CL = 2.2.