RFOIL. RFOIL.v.3.0 user's manual
report
RFOIL is a tool which is used extensively by the wind turbine industry in airfoil design. The tool was originally developed in 1996 by ECN, TUDelft and NLR as a “wind turbine modification” of the aerospace code XFOIL [1]. The first version of RFOIL, denoted by RFOIL.v1.1, improved the robustness of boundary layer computations, improved accuracy of predictions near stall and introduced the rotational effects within boundary layer. A shortcoming of RFOIL.v1.1 inherited from XFOIL was the underprediction of the drag coefficient. In 2016 ECN developed a new version of RFOIL, named RFOIL.v3.0 [2], which aimed to overcome this drawback. In this report we include the user manual for RFOIL.v3.0 and we present the assessment of the code’s accuracy using a database of wind tunnel measurements. The results from RFOIL.v3.0 have been validated with measurements on multiple airfoils, usually at 3 Reynolds numbers or even more. The validation is based on lift and drag measurements of known quality from the so-called ATG database, an internal database of airfoil lift, drag and moment coeffient experimental data. High quality measurements of pressure distributions from the AVATAR project up to Reynolds numbers of 15 million are also included. Chapter 2 describes how to activate the RFOIL.v3.0’s license and the various options available to perform the airfoil analysis, while Chapter 3 presents the validation of RFOIL.v3.0. The present version includes very minor upgrades to RFOIL.v3.0 and hence will be referred to as RFOIL.v3.04.
Topics
TNO Identifier
1006166
Publisher
TNO
Collation
932 p.
Place of publication
Petten