Airfoil Design
We have vast experience in subsonic airfoil and hydrofoil design. Our in-house developed code for airfoil and hydrofoil optimization MorphFoilOpt achieves high-quality designs fast. Our code is tailored to optimize foils with and without camber changing flaps and with our patented Doubleflap Laminar Flow airfoil (DLF) leading edge flap solution. It enables constraints for minimum overall thickness, minimum trailing edge angle, enclosed area for battery/tank volume, pitching moment and a leading edge stall constraint. We carefully analyze the resulting designs to fit your requirements in terms of performance, handling qualities and other needs.
A simple user interface makes optimization setup easy. Crucial result data like airfoil plots, airfoil coordinates and an optimization history video are automatically created after the optimization has converged. A subsonic foil with 8 prescribed optimization points can be created within 4-8 hours on a conventional desktop computer.
If necessary, we post-process the foil with the inverse routine in XFOIL. Our optimization software has been used for the design of several airfoils and hydrofoils, e.g. the hydrofoils for the Triton T-1 and Triton X-1 monofoils and the DLF demonstrator.
In-house tool MorphFoilOpt design process of an airfoil.
Wing planform and winglet design
Visualization of a wing planform and winglet optimization. The optimizer changes the wing dihedral and chords as well as the winglet height, chords and twist. The initial design is shown in transparent blue.
An optimal wing planform and winglet reduces the wing drag while having good handling qualities. Our optimization software WingPlanform combines a new geometry parameterization method with an in-house developed extended version of the DLR software Lifting_Line, capable of considering nonlinear viscous decambering effects.
We use a segregated design approach, where the foils are first optimized using MorphFoilOpt. With this foils, the wing and winglet shape is generated with WingPlanform. The validity for this approach has been shown for medium to high aspect ratio wings.
Stationary and instationary flight conditions can be considered including trim calculation for control surface deflections during the optimization run. For instance, this makes it possible to consider circling flight conditions with correct control surface deflections during optimization. A simple aeroelastic coupling method is also available, which makes it possible to take the effect of a flexible aircraft structure into account. With this, we design your wing planform shape, your retrofit winglets or your propeller – visually pleasing and aerodynamically performant.
Stabilizer design, trim and stability analysis
Our software offers the capability to perform trim calculations and stability analysis on the fly. With this, we design and size the empennage so that your aircraft has benign handling characteristics. We also offer redesigns of horizontal or vertical stabilizers or V-tails with new planform and airfoils for improved performance.
