Aerodynamics & Aerospace: Beginner CFD Training Package — Ep 01
3-D Airfoil
- Lesson
- 01
- Run Time
- 22m 7s
- Published
- Nov 27, 2025
- Category
- Aerodynamics & Aerospace
- Course Progress
- 0%
Description
This study uses ANSYS Fluent to analyze airflow around a 3D airfoil. Airfoils are key parts in aircraft wings and turbine blades, where they create lift and drag. The research examines pressure, velocity, and wake behavior behind the airfoil at known flow speeds, using CFD to provide accurate results without the cost of physical testing. The project models steady airflow at a maximum of 10 m/s around a 0.5-meter airfoil in a wind tunnel, with air treated as incompressible at constant properties (density: 1.225 kg/m³, viscosity: 0.001003 Pa·s).
Methodology
The geometry consists of a NACA airfoil centered in a large rectangular domain to avoid wall effects, with a uniform inlet flow, a pressure outlet, and symmetry or far-field conditions on the remaining boundaries. The domain is meshed in ANSYS Meshing using unstructured triangles, refined near the airfoil's leading and trailing edges and surfaces for boundary layer accuracy, and coarser further away, totaling roughly 380,000 nodes and 2.1 million elements to balance cost and precision.
The simulation uses a pressure-based, steady-state solver in ANSYS Fluent, with a 10 m/s velocity inlet, pressure outlet, no-slip wall on the airfoil, and symmetry at the far-field. SIMPLE coupling is used along with second-order schemes for pressure, momentum, and turbulence, with the k-ω SST turbulence model. The solution runs for 1000 iterations from a standard initialization.
Analysis
The pressure field shows high pressure at the leading edge due to stagnation, with low pressure on the upper surface acting as the primary source of lift and higher pressure on the lower surface. The velocity field shows faster flow over the top surface and a slower wake with trailing-edge vortices, which is the source of drag. Together, these results confirm lift generation from the pressure difference between the upper and lower surfaces, and drag arising from shear and wake effects, with the refined mesh ensuring accurate capture of the boundary layer behavior driving these outcomes.