Airfoil Drag Prediction and Decomposition

The accuracy and the consistency of numerical techniques for the prediction of the aerodynamic drag of airfoils in viscous transonic and subsonic flows are explored. Attention is paid to the calculation of the total drag as well as to the decomposition of the drag into its physical components: viscous drag and wave drag. Two different Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes solvers are used to generate the flowfield solutions for the NLF(1)-0416 and the RAE 2822 airfoils. The results show that wake integration can produce results comparable with those the often-used surface integral technique, thus demonstrating that wake integration has great potential in simplifying drag calculations for more complex problems such as multielement airfoils or complex three-dimensional configurations