This new line needs to be tangential to the aerofoil, as shown below. This will represent the chord length of the aerofoil, and once we have constrained it we can alter the chord length at will.Īfter the chord line is sketched, we need to put another line connected to the last line near the leading edge. Next, we want to make a centreline from the trailing edge to just beneath the leading edge. Now click Convert Entities from the Sketch tab, and in the Convert Entities panel, select the aerofoil curve from the design window. Of course, being a curve, it is still not useful for creating geometry, so select the Front Plane from the design tree and click Sketch from the Sketch tab. It will load the coordinates into the pane, as seen below.Ĭlick OK, and you will see the aerofoil curve appear in the design window, as seen in the image below. Click Browse, and then locate the text file containing the cleaned up coordinate data that you exported from Excel. Open SOLIDWORKS, open a new part file and on the top of the screen select:
You can now close Excel and open SOLIDWORKS. If an Excel warning appears, just click Yes to ignore it. Select a location to save the file to, pick a name for your file and click Save. We can click File>Save As and select Text (Tab Delimited) from the drop down menu. Now we have our X, Y and Z coordinates in three columns. Type “0” into the top cell in the third column, and click the little box at the bottom of the cell, or drag the box to the bottom of the data set in order to populate the third column with zeros. These zeros represent the Z coordinate, but as this is a two-dimensional curve, we have no need for a Z coordinate, and, hence, we set them to zero.
#Velocity over an airfoil generator full
Now that we have two columns with separated X and Y coordinates, we are going to need to create a third column full of zeros so that SOLIDWORKS can import it. This should separate the X and Y coordinates into two columns. On the second page of the Wizard, check the Tab and the Space delimiter boxes. On the first page of the Text to Columns Wizard, we want to select Delimited, if it isn’t already selected by default. Highlight Column A in Excel, click on Data, and select Text to Columns.
You will notice that both X and Y coordinates have been copied into a single column, so in order to make them usable we need to separate them into individual columns. Open up Microsoft Excel and copy/paste them into the first cell. The raw coordinates need cleaning up a little before we can import them into SOLIDWORKS. Note, the AirfoilTools site has a nice visualization tool that shows you how the shape of the aerofoil geometry changes as you modify the NACA parameters, which is great if you want to know exactly what those NACA numbers mean. You can copy the NACA 4415 aerofoil coordinates from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne aerofoil database website, or you can obtain it from the AirfoilTools website here.
This is relatively straightforward, as there is a wealth of aerofoil coordinate data libraries online, and we can import those coordinates into SOLIDWORKS by using the Curve Through XYZ function.įor this tutorial, we will be using a NACA 4415 aerofoil. Aerofoil Modellingīefore we can start simulating however, we need to design our aerofoil. In this tutorial, we are going to be taking a look at running flow visualization simulations on a basic aerofoil (or “airfoil”), which will hopefully be of use to those of you in aerospace engineering courses-or maybe you just like designing RC aircraft and want to simulate your wings before chopping up a load of balsa wood.
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