Entry Date:
May 15, 2002

XFOIL: Subsonic Airfoil Development System

Principal Investigator Mark Drela


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

It consists of a collection of menu-driven routines which perform various useful functions such as:

(*) Viscous (or inviscid) analysis of an existing airfoil, allowing
--forced or free transition
--transitional separation bubbles
--limited trailing edge separation
--lift and drag predictions just beyond CLmax
--Karman-Tsien compressibility correction
--fixed or varying Reynolds and/or Mach numbers

(*) Airfoil design and redesign by interactive modification of surface speed distributions, in two methods:
--Full-Inverse method, based on a complex-mapping formulation
--Mixed-Inverse method, an extension of XFOIL's basic panel method

(*) Airfoil redesign by interactive modification of geometric parameters such as
--max thickness and camber, highpoint position
--LE radius, TE thickness
--camber line via geometry specification
--camber line via loading change specification
--flap deflection
--explicit contour geometry (via screen cursor)

(*) Blending of airfoils
(*) Writing and reading of airfoil coordinates and polar save files
(*) Plotting of geometry, pressure distributions, and multiple polars