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Airfoil Lab
LiveA pocket-sized wind tunnel for wings. Airfoil Lab runs a real panel-method solver right on your phone: pick a NACA section or draw your own, set the angle of attack, and see the lift, drag, pressure, and stall behavior instantly. Built for people who actually think about wings, and honest about where a panel method stops being right.
Screenshots
What It Does
- →Pick from 24 NACA 4-digit and 5 NACA 5-digit sections, a Clark Y, Eppler 387, Selig S1223, or a supercritical section, type any NACA code, or draw your own shape with your finger
- →Set the angle of attack and instantly see lift, drag, pitching moment, and lift-to-drag, with transition and separation points marked on the wing
- →A classic XFoil-style pressure plot (-Cp along the chord) with the airfoil drawn at its real angle, plus live smoke flow around it
- →Sweep the angle to get polars (Cl vs alpha, Cl vs Cd, Cm vs alpha, L/D vs alpha) with Cl max and best L/D highlighted
- →Save up to 8 airfoils and switch between them to compare
- →Installs to your phone home screen and works fully offline
What I Built
- →A Hess-Smith panel method solver (constant-strength source panels plus a vortex, 160 panels by default), checked against thin-airfoil theory and published NACA data
- →An integral boundary layer: Thwaites laminar method, Michel transition, a Head-style turbulent integral, and Squire-Young drag, for real drag estimates in attached flow
- →Prandtl-Glauert compressibility up to about Mach 0.7, with an estimated critical Mach number
- →Every chart drawn by hand on canvas, with no charting library
- →A static, installable web app (React, TypeScript, Vite) with a service worker, so all the math runs on your own device
- →Honest about its limits: it is a panel method, not XFOIL, and says so where it matters (no shock modeling, post-stall lift not modeled)