RFOIL
RFOIL is a program based on XFOIL which was modified by the Wind Energy Research Group at TU Delft who we contacted to see if we could use their programme. RFOIL shows better correlation with experimental results, particularly around stall, and for this reason we chose to use RFOIL over XFOIL. RFOIL also includes the facility to include certain rotational effects, allowing the phenomenon of stall delay to be incorporated into its output. This facility was not used in this project but could be incorporated into a future study.
Text outputs from RFOIL could be opened in a spreadsheet program such as Excel and from this a set of polynomials describing how the lift and drag coefficients varied with α could then be extracted. Each set of polynomials was then written into the BEM code in the form a separate subroutine for each aerofoil included in the code.
