On the Kutta Condition in Potential Flow over Airfoil

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel method to implement the Kutta condition in irrotational, inviscid, incompressible flow (potential flow) over an airfoil. In contrast to common practice, this method is not based on the panel method. It is based on a finite difference scheme formulated on a boundary-fitted grid using an O-type elliptic grid generation technique. The proposed algorithm uses a novel and fast procedure to implement the Kutta condition by calculating the stream function over the airfoil surface through the derived expression for the airfoils with both finite trailing edge angle and cusped trailing edge. The results obtained show the excellent agreement with the results from analytical and panel methods thereby confirming the accuracy and correctness of the proposed method.