NUMERICAL STUDY OF THE FLOW OVER SYMMETRICAL AIRFOILS WITH GROUND EFFECTS

The paper presents the ground effects on the flow over five NACA symmetrical airfoils by analyzing the coefficients of lift. The unbounded flow over a selected airfoil was first simulated, and the results were validated against the established data in order to validate the method used in obtaining the lift coefficients. In the presence of ground, we kept the angle of attack to be constantly zero throughout the computations. Ground clearances were set based on those for aircrafts whose wing cross sections are the airfoils of interest. ANSYS was used for such numerical computations. We illustrate percentage increment of lift that is inversely proportional to the ground clearance. This work sheds insight on the important parameters that need to be taken into account in the operational of an aircraft