SERIES COMPLEX-POTENTIAL SOLUTION OF FLOW AROUND ARBITRARY AIRFOILS

An accurate, concise, and numerically efficient method has been developed to solve incompressible irrotational flow around arbitrary airfoils. The airfoil is transformed into a near-circular shape by an inverse Joukowski transformation. The flow around the transformed shape is then solved by adding a uniform flow, a circulation, and a series complex potential. The method gives almost exact results for a number of Karman-Trefftz airfoils with widely varying geometrical parameters and for the NACA 0012 wing section. For most of these airfoils, the method has been found to be generally more accurate than the Hess-Smith panel method, but at a fraction of the numerical labor.