Numerical investigation to study airfoil efficiency in plunging motion

The original incentive for developing the software package was the identification of the unsteady wake structure generation, and the prediction of aerodynamic performances of an airfoil. In fact, the Laplace´s Equation is useful to solve such problem because it allows the conversion of the flow field from a 3D problem to a 2D problem in order to find the potential on the surface. In this work, we are interested to thrust generation from an airfoil in pure plunging motion. Therefore, two dimensional inviscid flow codes is developed based on the Unsteady Panel Method to predict the oscillatory flow field and the aerodynamic propriety of the oscillating airfoil. Moreover, a comparison between the performances of two different airfoils the NACA0015 and NACA4412 has been made.