The Investigation Of The Effect Of Airfoil Modification On The Aerodynamic Performance Of Supercritical Airfoil

The supercritical airfoil has been widely used in high subsonic cruise aircraft, such as civil aircraft, transport aircraft and bomber aircraft, due to their good transonic aerodynamic performance. For two dimensional airfoil design, the researchers put massive effort since it is the basis of the three dimensional wing design. This thesis investigated the effect of the airfoil modification on the areodynamic performance of a certain supercritical airfoil.Using airfoil direct problem design method, based on published airfoil test data, this work calculated the original airfoil NPU-S 73613 and verified the reliability of the software and algrithom by applying Fluent commercial software. Furthermore, this research investigated the change of the airfoil aerodynamic performance by modifying different airfoil parameters, such as thickness, camber, leading edge radius and trailing edge thickness. Lastly, this thesis proposed two new modified airfoils on the basis of the original airfoil according to previous results and experiences in order to improve the aerodynamic performance of the original airfoil.The predicted results showed that the effect of the modification of thickness, its location and divergent trailing edge on the aerodynamic feature is dramatic. Especially the modification of the location of the maximum thickness and divergent trailing edge has significant influence on the reduction of the intensity of the shock wave and the delay of the critical March number. In comparison to the original airfoil, the lift to drag ratio for the modification 1 and 2 increased -2.14% and 2.67% respectively, which indicated the remarkable improvement of the transonic aerodynamic performance to the original airfoil.