Optimizing High-Lift Airfoils for Formula Student Vehicles

This document presents a study on the design and simulation of a high-lift airfoil intended for usage in multielement setups such as the wings present on open-wheel race cars. With the advancement of open-wheel race car aerodynamics, the design of existing high-lift airfoils has been altered to create a more useful and practical general profile. Adjoint optimization tools in CFD (ANSYS Fluent) were employed to increase the airfoil’s performance beyond existing high-lift profiles (Selig S1223). Improvements of up to 20% with a C_L of 2.4 were recorded. To further evaluate performance, the airfoil was made the basis of a full three-dimensional aerodynamics package design for an open-wheel Formula Student car. CFD simulations were carried out on the same and revealed performance characteristics of the airfoil in a more practical application. These CFD simulations were calibrated with experimental values from coast-down testing data with an accuracy of 8%.