Comment by g129774
2 years ago
"better" airfoils are used in experimental craft design. for example mark drela wrote and used xfoil to design wings for mit's project daedalus, a human powered long distance flight aircraft. this is the case where, like sibling commenter stated, you need that extra % to get better performance characteristics. you can still run xfoil, it's a delightfully oldschol fortran program.
I have a friend whose PhD is in computational flow dynamics, as applied to airfoil design. He works almost exclusively in fortran (which is wild to me, for someone under 35, but I guess its the "industry" standard). I just asked him about xfoil and he observed that there are more modern programs for (as he put it) more "realistic/complex" designs, but said it was a good starting place.
Because Fortran was the industry standard for any heavy scientific calculation (like aerodynamics or nuclear bombs), the Fortran compiler has been optimised to death... And thus Fortran is still the industry standard.
oh i'm sure state of the art has advanced since then. i have the necessary physics background, but it's not otherwise my domain: i once used xfoil to design an airfoil for an autonomous model glider as a hackerspace project back when i had free time for things like that many years ago. the glider was also loaded into x-plane to develop and test the autonomous part. so whenever various experimental aircraft projects popup, i'm likely to look into them, and then also notice the peculiar foils they use.
It really depends. Up until the 90s Fortran was completely dominant. These days a lot of people have moved to C++. Important open source codes such as OpenFOAM and SU2 are in c++.
FORTRAN is easier to optimize than something like C so is much used for numerical computation