On Jan 22, 10:14 am, Martin Gregorie
wrote:
wrote:
On Jan 21, 5:43 pm, Craig wrote:
On Jan 21, 2:39 pm, wrote:

The Gottingen 549 Airfoil is used on many sailplanes, including my
Cherokee II. For my aerodynamics class, I am developing a FORTRAN
program to use the panel method to determine aerodynamic coefficients
for an airfoil. Part of the exercise is to first pick an airfoil with
known coordinates and with available wind tunnel or other experimental
data so that we have something to compare our final answer. I would
obviously enjoy using the Cherokee's airfoil for the project, but can
not find any experimental data out there for it. Any suggestions?
Thanks!
No luck so far with the Goe 549. Michael Selig and his group have
data on their site for the Goe-417ahttp://www.ae.uiuc.edu/m-selig/pub/LSATs/vol3/
Lots of other interesting data for other airfoils also.

Good luck with your project,
Craig

Craig,

thanks I had come across UIUC's website. Let me know if you find
anything out there!

Have you considered using Mark Drela's XFOIL instead of writing your own
analysis program?

http://raphael.mit.edu/xfoil/

If you have a good set of section co-ordinates for the Go 549 and can
approximate the RN you operate at, then XFOIL can generate the polars,
etc. from it.

If you're running 32 bit Windows you can download the executable. For
anything else that has the GNU C/C++ compiler and the Fortran 77
preprocessor (f77) installed, just download the source files and compile
it.

--
martin@ | Martin Gregorie
gregorie. | Essex, UK
org |

That would, and does, work very well for getting the aerodynamic
characteristics of an airfoil.
The assignment is to find an airfoil that has known experimental data,
such as wind tunnel testing. Then we write our own FORTRAN code and
check our results against the experimental data. Sadly, I dont think
running the shape in XFOIL would satisfy the "experimental data"
requirement.