Verification of a Mild-Stall Design Airfoil with ANSYS FLUENT

Abstract

This paper describes an investigation of aerodynamic performance and a Mild-Stall characteristic of the designed airfoil for Fixed-Wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (Fixed-Wing UAV). The numerical simulations of Lift force and Drag force of the designed airfoil from numerical results by using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) are compared with an experiment. The computational domain was discretized using an unstructured mesh of 7,100,000 elements. The steady and incompressible flow with a Realizable K-epsilon turbulence model is used in all study cases. The simulations were held at a Reynolds number of 1,000,000. Results show the force coefficients and also the velocity contours and streamlines at different angle of attack, from 0 to 20 degrees. The results support that this designed airfoil can achieve the Mild-Stall characteristic. Lift force is decreased slightly in the mild-stall region after the angle of attack generated the maximum Lift force. This can extend the range of flight lift coefficient and help to provide a safe flight in gusty wind.