XFOIL is an interactive program for the design and analysis of subsonic isolated airfoils. Given the coordinates specifying the shape of a 2D airfoil, Reynolds and Mach numbers, XFOIL can calculate the pressure distribution on the airfoil and hence lift and drag characteristics. The program also allows inverse design - it will vary an airfoil shape to achieve the desired parameters. It is released under the GNU GPL.HistoryXFOIL was first developed by Mark Drela at MIT as a design tool for the MIT Daedalus project in the 1980s. It was further developed in collaboration with Harold Youngren. The current version is 6.97, released in April 2008. Despite its vintage, it is still widely used.XFOIL is written in FORTRAN.Similar ProgramsA successor to XFOIL called XFLR5 was written and is actively maintained by Andre Deperrois, principally for use on model aircraft design. It is written in C++.An unrelated program called JavaFoil may be used for similar analysis. It is written in Java.External links The XFOIL home page XFLR5
