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leal26 edited this page Aug 4, 2015 · 4 revisions

Overview

This project was elaborated because of the need of optimizing an airfoil according to its aerodynamic and structural performance (conference paper). Contrary to available options such as XFLR5, pyXFOIL aims to be an open source Python code. It is a quick and easy way to find the aerodynamic pressure and the drag and lift coefficients through the use of MIT's XFOIL embedded in Python. Contrary to the other libraries, pyXFOIL does not have a GUI and is intended to be used in Python codes for optimizations or any other process that requires several aerodynamic analysis.

While this library was created, other developers create similar tools, pyxfoil and python-airfoil. Although I feel confident on my code, the objective of this project is to also learn and incorporate different aspects from these other codes.

Example

To depict how easy it is to use pyXFOIL, an example of a incompressible analysis of a NACA airfoil es depicted below. These two lines are sufficient to retrieve the values of all the airfoil's aerodynamic coefficients.

import pyXFOIL as xf
xf.find_coefficients(airfoil='naca0012', alpha=12.,NACA=True)

WRITE EXPECTED OUTPUT

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