A little help needed

daverave

New Member
Hello everyone,

I'm new to this forum so please move this thread if it is in the wrong spot.

I am a student studying a masters in Civil & Structural Engineering at the university of leeds. For my final years dissertation i chose to do some computational fluid modelling of the aerodynamics of sails. A part of this involves creating a virtual wind tunnel, and blowing air through a 2d cross section of a sail (in plan view).

I am a laser sailor, race regularly but not excessively and finish usually in the 2/3 of the fleet at club racing, so I know how things work reasonably well.

  • To create the 2d sail geometry I use a program called Gambit.
  • To run the virtual wind tunnel, I will use a piece of software called Fluent (v popular with the Americas Cup)
  • In order to create the sail curve I use this online Java applet: http://www.ppart.de/aerodynamics/profiles/NACA4.html.
The Java applet can create aerofoil profiles depending on thickness (set it to zero), skew, camber etc (as you can see on the site). I want to model a laser sail through close hauled, beam reach and broad reach points of sailing. For close hauled I know we need cunningham on, outhaul tight, kicker/vang tight to depower - the sail needs to act as a foil to prevent stalling. Vice versa for downwind.

For each point I think I have the correct sail shape in plan view.

Here's my attempt:

Close Hauled
closehauled.png

Maximum camber (0-9):3
Max camber pos. (0-9): 2
Thickness (0-99): 0
Point size: 4

Beam Reach
beamreach.png



Broad Reach
broadreach.png


Am I correct? Using the link, what do you think the three points should be set at? Use the sliders to change the aerofoil's shape - make thickness zero (negligable) and ignore the sliders below "# Points".
 

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