A Wind Tunnel based CFD Validation Procedure for Sail Design

The use of computational fluid dynamics simulators in a design procedure usually requires choosing between precision and computational cost. This is especially true if the simulator is used within an automatic design environment where it is going to be run recursively in many iterations. This work presents an experimental validation procedure applied to a simplified aerodynamic simulator for sail design. The simulator permits evaluating a large number of different alternatives with a moderate computational cost. However, some validation of the achieved numerical results is required in order to obtain realistic results.