The little project I intend to document in this blog has been moving along in fits and starts since my undergraduate days, some (shudder) thirty years ago. At that time I was introduced to panel methods as a means of analyzing airfoils. Modeling an elegantly curved surface as a series of straight lines, and then modelling smooth airflow as a series of tiny tornadoes just struck me as ugly!
On the other hand, I was enchanted with the use of complex numbers to transform simple shapes, easy to analyze, into complex ones. Complex transforms have long been used in the design of airfoils (mapping a cylinder to a shape to achieve a certain velocity distribution), but not in the analysis of airfoils (mapping an airfoil to a circle in order to determine the velocity distribution).
I have gone down many blind alleys over the years, but started making real progress about 3 years ago. My math was solid, my code was solid, and then my laptop crashed.
I had intended to reorganize, anyway. Since I've given up becoming a rich aviation entrepreneur, I've decided to do my coding (https://github.com/SlowThought/SlowFlight) and thinking (here) in public, in the hope that somebody might find my musings useful.
On the other hand, I was enchanted with the use of complex numbers to transform simple shapes, easy to analyze, into complex ones. Complex transforms have long been used in the design of airfoils (mapping a cylinder to a shape to achieve a certain velocity distribution), but not in the analysis of airfoils (mapping an airfoil to a circle in order to determine the velocity distribution).
I have gone down many blind alleys over the years, but started making real progress about 3 years ago. My math was solid, my code was solid, and then my laptop crashed.
I had intended to reorganize, anyway. Since I've given up becoming a rich aviation entrepreneur, I've decided to do my coding (https://github.com/SlowThought/SlowFlight) and thinking (here) in public, in the hope that somebody might find my musings useful.
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