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The wings were built using a combination of Thin Airfoil Theory to design the airfoil and Lifting Line Theory to design the wing shape. 

  • Thin Airfoil Theory - 

    • Allows us to collapse airfoil onto camber line if the max thickness is much less than the chord length.​

    • Enforces the No Penetration Boundary Condition through the introduction of vortices along the camber line.

    • The Thin Airfoil Theory does not address the Kutta Condition, which required an initial condition where the vortex strength per unit length is set to zero at the trailing edge.

    • The Thin Airfoil Theory requires the approximation of all angles used in the derivation to be small, limiting the Theory to non-separated flow.

  • Lifting Line Theory - 

    • Derived by stacking an infinite number of vortices along the lifting line, where each vortex trails off at a different point in the wingspan. 

    • The circulation is solved by setting the sectional lift from the Kutta-Joukowski Theorem equal to the sectional lift from the Thin Airfoil Theory, where the Thin Airfoil Theory has been modified to include downwash.

    • Lift and drag can then be calculated by integrating the circulation along the wingspan.

    • Solution to Finite Wing Theory

Link to Finite Wing/Airfoil Code

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