Engineering Commons^™

Universal Airfoil Parametrization Using B-Splines, Dev Rajnarayan, Andrew Ning, Judd Mehr

Faculty Publications

In this paper, we apply well-known techniques for parametric curves to the definition and deformation of airfoil sections. While it has already been shown that many versions of Kulfan’s Class Shape Transformation (CST) are exactly equivalent to Bézier curves, we show here that all NACA 4-digit thickness distributions and the PARSEC parametrization of Sobiezcky are also higher-order Bézier curves. As with CST, Béziers and B-Splines provide direct control over aerodynamically meaningful features such as nose radius and boat-tail angle, but also provide more a intuitive parametrization of the rest of the airfoil surface. We show the efficacy of B-Spline-based parametrizations …