Airfoil curves?

[Wayne]

Alex - Here is a huge request. Look out it might become a rabbit hole.

When I export from WH, I'm forced to use DXF, and the airfoils come into my CAD with a a lot of points. This is fine if I'm just going to the laser as is, but for doing refinements to the structures it soon taxes the CAD program. I'd love if it could convert the airfoil to curves accurately, and then output them the same way. I find myself more and more working with tapered and blended airfoils that end up being a ton of complexity for me in CAD. Converting them to curves manually is fine for one or two ribs, but it is horrible for anything more.

I'm not even sure if this is possible. Another programmer here made a little utility to do just this, but it takes forever, and I found the end results were not ideal. It would also me handy to be able to fine tune the tip and trailing edges of some airfoils.

 

[alex_pozgaj]

Yes, I understand the desire - and I have looked into it in the past, with not much success.

The hardest part would be to find out which parts of the rib can be replaced by a spline - this could go OK (except for some strange airfoils like KFm), but it becomes very hard when there are sharp edges and curbs introduced by sheetings, spars, and similar.

Alternatively, reducing the number of points in special cases, like when 3 or more points are exactly lined up, or when two or more points are exactly on top of each other (that can happen, don't ask please ), might work better, but I'm not sure how much of an improvement that would be.

I'll try to look into reduction of the number of points in the mentioned special cases, but as I said, I'm not sure how much that will actually help.

 

[Wayne]

Yeah, for now I just redraw them in CAD, but not ideal when working with tapered panels with blended airfoils.