Enhancing the Lift and Drag Coefficients through an Integrated Thin NACA Airfoil Coupled with Surface Indentation Design

Lourdes, Ronald James Patrick (2022) Enhancing the Lift and Drag Coefficients through an Integrated Thin NACA Airfoil Coupled with Surface Indentation Design. Final Year Project (Bachelor), Tunku Abdul Rahman University College.

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Abstract

NACA airfoils are well known standards of airfoil design based on the concepts of thin airfoil theory. Numerous researches have been done on enhancing the aerodynamics of NACA airfoils by the use of passive flow control modifications. However, most of them introduce a single modification into the existing airfoils. This project addresses this area by introducing two modifications on the existing NACA 2412 airfoil using a bio-inspired design with surface indentations to improve the aerodynamic properties which are lift and drag coefficients, lift to drag ratio and boundary layer separation. The literature review presented has provided relevant and valuable information towards the project objectives. Thourough analysis has been done on previous modifications done using bio-inspired modifications and surface effects on the airfoil. The information obtained has led to the modifications in this project to include a bio-inspired leading edge nose based on a Marlin fish and outward surface dimples over the leading edge surface. Multiple conceptual designs were made using based on the individual modifications to identify an ideal configuration for the selected NACA airfoil. The method adopted for carrying out this project is by numerical analysis using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) in ANSYS FLUENT. The results found that having 3 outward dimples placed at 0.1C provides the highest overall performance in terms of lift and drag production while a front nose length of 0.15C generated the best performance at low angles of attack. A final design was developed based on the individual modification results. The results showed similar performance to the original NACA 2412 airfoil at low angles of attack with no improvement. An update was made to the final design by removing the dimples which showed improvement in performance up to 6.00% at low angles of attack particularly for lift to drag ratio. Boundary layer separation remained the same with the original NACA airfoil. The differences between the use of the two modification airfoil and single modification airfoil in the analysis were documented. The findings from this project provide a modified airfoil that enhances the performance at low cruising angles.