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2. The airfoil with the proper ideal or design lift coefficient ( Cld or Cli ). 3.

The airfoil with the lowest minimum drag coefficient ( Cd min ). 4. The airfoil with the highest lift-to-drag ratio ((Cl/Cd)max). 5. The airfoil with the highest lift curve slope ( ClDmax ). 6. The airfoil with the lowest pitching moment coefficient (Cm). 7. The proper stall quality in the stall region (the variation must be gentile, not sharp). 8. The airfoil must be structurally reinforceable. The airfoil should not that much thin that spars cannot be placed inside. 9. The airfoil must be such that the cross section is manufacturable. 10. The cost requirements must be considered. 11. Other design requirements must be considered. For instance, if the fuel tank has been designated to be places inside the wing inboard section, the airfoil must allow the sufficient space for this purpose. 12. If more than one airfoil is considered for a wing, the integration of two airfoils in one wing must be observed. This item will be discussed in more details in section 5.8. Usually, there is no unique airfoil that that has the optimum values for all above-mentioned requirements. For example, you may find an airfoil that has the highest Clmax , but not the highest
Cl C . In such cases, there must be compromise through a weighting process, since not all d max design requirements have the same importance. The weighting process will be discussed later in this chapter.

As a guidance, the typical values for the airfoil maximum thickness-to-chord ratio of majority of aircraft are about 6% to 18%. 1- For a low speed aircraft with a high lift requirement (such as cargo aircraft), the typical wing (t/c)max is about 15% - 18%. 2- For a high speed aircraft with a low lift requirement (such as high subsonic passenger aircraft), the typical wing (t/c)max is about 9% - 12%. 3- For the supersonic aircraft, the typical wing (t/c)max is about 6% - 9%. The details of airfoil selection procedure will be presented in section5.3.7. Figure 5.17 illustrates a few sample airfoils.

5.4.5. NACA Airfoils The main focus of this section is how to select a wing airfoil from the available list of NACA airfoils, so this section is dedicated to the introduction of NACA airfoils. One of the most reliable resources and widely used data base is the airfoils that have been developed by NACA (predecessor of NASA) in 1930s and 1940s. Three following groups of NACA airfoils are more interesting: Four-digit NACA airfoils Five-digit NACA airfoils
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Wing Design

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