Prediction and Comparison of low-Reynolds Airfoil Performance

This semester project is aiming to compare different airfoils in order to select the most promising one as blade shape for scaled the straight-bladed giromills used in wind tunnel experiments. For this matter, a large amount of steady-state CFD-simulations have been performed trying to characterize aerodynamic airfoil's performance at low Reynolds number. It is a continuation of a previous semester project which already selected the numerical model to use for the simulation and developed an automation process for batching several simulations which facilitated the creation of the dataset presented in this report. In total, thirteen profiles have been investigated through various angles of attack and for chord Reynolds numbers of 1x10^4, 2x10^4 and 4x10^4. The airfoils chosen consist of the symmetrical NACA profiles of different thicknesses (NACA 0005 to NACA 0021), three modified NACA with sharp leading edge (NACA 0005-05, NACA 0009-05 and NACA0012-05), two 5% cambered NACA profiles (NACA 5505 and NACA 5510) and three specific airfoils for low Reynolds number (E387, S1223 and BW3). Based on the tangential force coefficients of the airfoils, NACA5505 and BW3 showed the overall best performances at this range of Reynolds which is in accordance with the existing studies on the subject as they are both thin airfoils with around 5% maximum camber at mid chord.