XFOIL is an interactive program for the design and analysis of subsonic isolated airfoils.
It consists of a collection of menu-driven routines which perform various useful functions such as:
Viscous (or inviscid) analysis of an existing airfoil, allowing
forced or free transition transitional separation bubbles limited trailing edge
separation
lift and drag predictions just beyond CLmax Karman-Tsien compressibility correction
fixed or varying Reynolds and/or Mach numbers
Airfoil design and redesign by interactive modification of surface speed distributions,
in two methods:
Full-Inverse method, based on a complex-mapping formulation & Mixed-Inverse
method, an extension of XFOIL's basic panel method
Airfoil redesign by interactive modification of geometric parameters such as
max thickness and camber, highpoint position
LE radius, TE thickness
camber line via geometry specification
camber line via loading change specification
flap deflection
explicit contour geometry (via screen cursor)
Blending of airfoils
Writing and reading of airfoil coordinates and polar save files
Plotting of geometry, pressure distributions, and multiple polars
XFOIL is released under the GNU General Public License.
By downloading the software you agree to abide by the GPL conditions.
The most important conditions are:
Any port of this XFOIL software to another platform must be made public under
the GNU GPL
Any port of this XFOIL software to another platform must be provided with the
source code
Any port of this XFOIL software must retain the "XFOIL x.xx" name
and the original copyright
Announcements
An Xfoil electronic bulletin board has been created at YahooGroups.
The intent is to exchange information on Xfoil and other aero software.
Software
xfoilP3.zip (508267 bytes)
Xfoil 6.94 executable for Win32, optimized for Pentium 3.
xfoilP4.zip (531947 bytes)
Xfoil 6.94 executable for Win32, optimized for Pentium 4.
Pplot.zip (289812 bytes)
Pplot executable for Win32 (optional separate polar save-file plotter).
Pxplot.zip (281493 bytes)
Pxplot executable for Win32 (optional separate polar dump-file plotter).
Note: The source code for Xfoil itself is the same for Unix and Win32. The plot
library directory (plotlib) has a separate win32 subdirectory. See all the README
files for more info.
Win32 Notes: Interaction with Win32 XFOIL is through a DOS-type text console
window. Some of Microsoft's Win32 OS'es (Win95/98/ME) have limitations on #
of lines in a console window and cannot fully display XFOIL menus or output.
Win95/98/ME also have other shortcomings with regard to resource usage and stability
although XFOIL runs under these OS'es. Windows NT, Win2000 and Windows XP are
the recommended Win32 platforms.
Win32 Exe Notes: The executables for Win32 were compiled using the Intel Fortran
Compiler 5.01-15 and Visual C++6.0. The Intel compiler (thanks to Tom Clarkson
at Intel) was used to optimize executables for P3 and P4 Pentium architectures.
The XFOIL executables should run on any Win32 Pentium-class machine as compiler
options were used to include both optimized code and generic Pentium or AMD
processor code for portability.
Documents
xfoil_doc.pdf (311472 bytes).
PDF version of User Guide, with table of contents and data flow diagram.
sessions.txt
Sample Xfoil session inputs.
version_notes.txt
Summary of changes made for recent Xfoil versions.
Profiles