Sunday, April 14, 2019

Airfoil Simulator

Over the past few months I have been working on combining my interests in aerospace engineering, fluid mechanics, and programming into the following project, which simulates airflow over different types of airfoils. I have always been fascinated with airplanes and the engineering principles behind their creation, which prompted me to try and build one (albeit on a smaller scale) for myself (see the previous post for more details). Part of the process later involved me simulating the flow over the airplane in ANSYS, further piquing my curiosity in the field of computational fluid dynamics and simulation. I decided to further explore this topic alongside my other project and developed, with some assistance from my father, a simple 2D Navier-Stokes fluid solver (link here). This project is a reflection of my interests in CFD and aerospace engineering, since it combines some of the old code from the previous solver with further optimizations and new airfoil boundary layer generation that finds each body's enclosing outer edge and fills the rest of it to prevent any gas from advecting through.

Here's a demo video of the simulation at work, which is much choppier than the actual program due to being recorded at a lower framerate.

I've posted a Windows build along with the source code which, while being far from perfect and requiring a bit of scrubbing, is functional and should give you an idea of how the program works.

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