VisualFoil Plus is a stand-alone package for airfoil (2D) design and analysis in incompressible and compressible flows. The software can be used to analyze airfoils at subsonic, transonic and supersonic speeds and is suitable for analyzing blade cross sections for machinery that typically operate at high speeds such as helicopter blades, propellers, turbines and high speed fans.

VisualFoil Plus uses a linear strength vortex panel method for incompressible flow solutions. This solution is coupled with the boundary layer equations to rapidly compute profile drag, transition, separation and to estimate airfoil stall.

VisualFoil Plus solves the two-dimensional compressible Euler equations using a finite-volume approach. The solution is advanced in time by a 4th order runge-kutta scheme using local time steps. The flow field is descretized in space using an o-grid along with flux vector splitting at the cell boundaries. This method is accurate for computing the lift coefficient for high mach number subsonic flows. For supersonic flows, the lift coefficient and wave drag coefficients can be computed with good accuracy. Typically, solutions converge between 20 seconds and 10 minutes (depending on grid size) on a Pentium based PC.

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