Programs used for generating and easily access a public airfoil database with tons of aerodynamic data
To make aerodynamic force and moment calculations it's often required to posses 2D airfoil aerodynamic coefficients, usually the best the quality of the data is, the best is the final result. Unfortunally this data is only obtained by tons experiments, wich results (if exists) are spreaded across the internet through a lot of documents, in a hard to consume way, like scanned NACA Reports, or it's calculated by solvers like Xfoil, wich can take a lot of effort and time if you're willing to do this calculations through a variety of Reynolds and Mach numbers.
As a solution to that problem, it's proposed to maintain an 2D airfoil public database capable of retaining data from various sources and present it in a more consumable way, making the process of manually typing NACA Reports results or xfoil calculation an one-time-thing.
To make this more suitable, it is pre-populated with all airfoil geometries from UIUC database (link below) and they aerodynamic coefficients for a vast range of Reynolds and Mach numbers together with an method for extending their alfa range up to 110° using Björn Montgomerie method.
More detail in the document contained in the repository, and in the youtube link below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbpSJpwQThg
https://m-selig.ae.illinois.edu/ads/coord_database.html
The database can be accessed through any mysql connector available for the programing language you chose (more details on the connectors and APIs in https://www.mysql.com/products/connector/), but this repository it's shipped with pre made scripts that helps to access and visualize and download the data in it using python or matlab, wich will be covered next.
The URL/IP to access the database provided may change in future, this repository will provide the latest URL/IP for the connection
For the matlab script it's necessary to download the mysql ODBC driver that can be found on https://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/odbc/5.3.html and configure it following this steps:
Open windows search bar and search for windows administrative tools
Click on ODBC Data Sources (32 or 64bit)
Click on System DSN tab and then click on "add" buttom
Click on MySQL ODBC 5.3 Unicode driver and fill the forms on the next window as below and press ok:
After those steps you should be able to excecute AeroSQL_Explorer.m or AeroSQL_Explorer_matlab_2018.m (for matlab versions below 2018). The result should be as the following:
To use python database access scripts you should have numpy, matplotlib and pymysql installed and provide a pymysql cursor as the example below
import pymysql as sql
aerosqldb = sql.connect(host='aerosqldb.ddns.net',
user='Reader',
password='',
db='AeroSQLDB')
cursor = aerosqldb.cursor()
with that being done, just import AeroSQLDB_Utilities module and provide the cursor as the first argument, the rest should be very straightforward