[kaywarner]

Afternoon all,

As you might have guessed i'm brand new to CFD, so forgive the stupidity of this one;

Why do the majority of CFD outputs you find on, say a google image search, give a coefficient of pressure over an aerofoil rather than something usefull like a coefficient of lift or drag?

If anyone could help iron this for me it would be a great help.

Many thanks for reading the post,

Kay

[walli]

Originally Posted by kaywarner

Why do the majority of CFD outputs you find on, say a google image search, give a coefficient of pressure over an aerofoil rather than something usefull like a coefficient of lift or drag?

Plotting lift or drag coeffs over an airfoil would be quite boring and give no further insight. A lift or drag coefficient is an integrated (global) coefficient for a given geometry, whereas a pressure coefficient can be evaluated locally. It only makes sense to do plots of those coefficients for varying geometries, e.g. plot cD vs. an airfoil parameter.

[kaywarner]

Thats excellent - thanks so much.