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 flow s are explored. Attention is paid to the calculation of the total drag as w ell as to the decomposition of the drag into its physical components: visco us drag and wave drag. Two different Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes solver s 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 resul ts comparable with those the often-used surface integral technique, thus de monstrating that wake integration has great potential in simplifying drag c alculations for more complex problems such as multielement airfoils or comp lex three-dimensional configurations.