DEVELOPMENT OF A TWO-DIMENSIONAL SAIL ANALYSIS CODE FOR USE AS A TEACHING TOOL IN AN UNDERGRADUATE FLUID DYNAMICS COURSE

摘要

A typical undergraduate fluid dynamics course includes sections on Bernoulli's equation, flow visualization, and lift and drag for external flows. The purpose of this work has been to develop a fully interactive, two-dimensional potential flow solver using a panel method for flow over thin-sail geometries to aid in student understanding of these topics. The user may specify either rigid sail shapes, or flexible sails in which the final equilibrium shapes are determined by the pressure distribution. The solver was developed in Fortran 90/95. The user interface and graphics routines were developed using the high-level plotting library DISLIN. A variety of controls are available to adjust sail shapes and angles-of-attack. Available graphics include velocity vectors, pressure coefficient contours, and streamlines. Lift, axial and normal force coefficients are also output in the form of bar graphs. The code was recently introduced in an undergraduate fluid dynamics class taught by the author, and is available from the author's website for download.