XFOIL is an interactive program for the design and analysis of subsonic isolated

airfoil An airfoil (American English) or aerofoil (British English) is the cross-sectional shape of an object whose motion through a gas is capable of generating significant lift, such as a wing, a sail, or the blades of propeller, rotor, or turbine. ...

s. Given the coordinates specifying the shape of a 2D airfoil,

Reynolds Reynolds may refer to: Places Australia *Hundred of Reynolds, a cadastral unit in South Australia *Hundred of Reynolds (Northern Territory), a cadastral unit in the Northern Territory of Australia United States * Reynolds, Mendocino County, Calif ...

and Mach numbers, XFOIL can calculate the pressure distribution on the airfoil and hence

lift Lift or LIFT may refer to: Physical devices * Elevator, or lift, a device used for raising and lowering people or goods ** Paternoster lift, a type of lift using a continuous chain of cars which do not stop ** Patient lift, or Hoyer lift, mobile ...

and drag characteristics. The program also allows ''inverse design'' - it will vary an airfoil shape to achieve the desired parameters. It is released under the

GNU GPL The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general us ...

History

XFOIL was first developed by

Mark Drela Mark Drela (July 1, 1959) is an American aeronautical engineer, currently the Professor of Fluid Dynamics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an Elected Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. He is primarily ...

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the mo ...

as a design tool for the

MIT Daedalus The MIT Aeronautics and Astronautics Department's Daedalus was a human-powered aircraftJohn McIntyreMan's Greatest Flight, ''AeroModeller'', August 1988 (in files of Royal Aeronautical Society Human Powered Aircraft Group) (accessed Nov. 13 2012) ...

project in the 1980s. It was further developed in collaboration with Harold Youngren. The current version is 6.99, released in December 2013. Despite its vintage, it is still widely used. XFOIL is written in FORTRAN.

Similar software

{{external links, date=December 2021 * XFOIL was translated to the C++ language and integrated in the program XFLR5, principally for use on model aircraft design. * A

MATLAB MATLAB (an abbreviation of "MATrix LABoratory") is a proprietary multi-paradigm programming language and numeric computing environment developed by MathWorks. MATLAB allows matrix manipulations, plotting of functions and data, implementation ...

implementation calle
Xfoil for matlab
has been written. * An unrelated program calle

may be used for similar analysis. It is written in

Java Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's List ...

. * Vortexje is an independent panel method implementation in 3D. *

QBlade QBlade is a public source, cross-platform simulation software for wind turbine blade design and aerodynamic simulation.D. Marten,'' et al''., "QBlade: a modern tool for the aeroelastic simulation of wind turbines" PhD Thesis, TU Berlin, 2020. Ava ...

implements XFOIL via XFLR5 for use in wind turbine design. *

OpenVSP OpenVSP, also known as Open Vehicle Sketch Pad, is an open source parametric aircraft geometry tool originally developed by NASA. It can be used to create 3D models of aircraft and to support engineering analysis of those models. Predecessors to ...

is a parametric aircraft geometry and aerodynamic analysis tool supported by

NASA The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) is an independent agency of the US federal government responsible for the civil space program, aeronautics research, and space research. NASA was established in 1958, succeeding t ...

References

External links

The XFOIL home page

Free computer-aided design software Free software programmed in Fortran Computer-aided engineering software for Linux