The Behind Story

Challenge: Determining areas of mesh refinement

Solution: Background research into airfoil performance to determine the locations of mesh refinement. Simulation of a baseline design to inform design iterations.

For a final class project in my computational engineering course, I designed two airfoils to experiment with different surfaces and shapes on performance. We learn that the engineering classics, such as divots in a golf ball, had negative outcomes for the testing parameters (drag and lift). Angled shapes had a positive impact on drag and lift and were the highest-performing design. The main challenges with simulation testing is setting up the testing environment with constitutive equations, boundary conditions, mesh resolutions, and testing parameters.