I’d like to introduce WingHopper.com to the Foil.Zone community! WingHopper is a parametric wing design web app that allows anyone to create a beautiful, efficient, and accurate wing model.
Initially I developed WingHopper for my naval architecture and hydrofoil design consulting, using it as the basis of the hydrofoil design work I undertake. I’ve made into a web app that allows for anyone to design a beautiful wing that can be exported to 3DM, STL, OBJ, or STEP file formats. I’ve also incorporated an XML export that can be imported by XFLR5, a great open-source panel code CFD program. The goal of all of this is to provide a useful and powerful design tool to the sailing + foiling communities in order to gain knowledge and develop technology to move our industry forward.
I’ve just launched the website and there are a lot of upgrades + improvements to make over the next few months. I’d appreciate any feedback on the site, and definitely want to hear from you if you find it useful!
The site and tool is completely free to use, just make a free account and start designing. Please let me know if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions. Happy foiling!
Awsome tool man, thank you very much for making this available to us.
One or two notes/feedback
Maybe ad a way to save your design progress on the site?
Think the refresh was set too soon because I was playing around for about 40min and it reverted to the original design.
Is there a way to bring the naca profiles to the site where you could just select them from a dropdown?
Once I’m done designing a wing ill put it through its paces and curve analysis, but for now, I’m loving the simplicity.
Thanks Vanger! Appreciate the feedback, seriously.
Definitely in the works. I’ll sort out a way to save wings to your profile, to share publicly or keep private. Sorry to hear it refreshed after 40 minutes, I’ll look into that issue.
Also a possibility. It’s easy enough to download the UIUC database so this is not a priority of mine, but definitely a feature for the future.
I think it’d be great to have a tutorial on exporting and running CFD. I didn’t realise XFLR had CFD built in. I’d love to see how that chain looks and give it a try.
I think there’s a bit of a shortage of newbie XFLR and FOAM tutorials.
Certainly cool stuff @Surfcowboy! I know Zach and have been following his progress for a while. Thanks for putting it out here to the community @ZachMoves.
Really like the tool. I tried to upload different .dat profile files I downloaded from UIUC UIUC Airfoil Data Site
I always get an upload error (upload failed)
What is the required format to upload a profile?
EDIT
found it in the FAQ, extension needs to be changed from .dat to .txt, works now
Did a bit of experimenting and found that this only happens when you add a NACA profile set. So this makes it unusable for me if it does not plot the profile correctly.
With these sections, when you open the file (change extension to txt), you should have two columns - left column = X coordinate, right column = Y coordinate. The airfoil section is represented with leading edge to the left (trailing edge to the right not like pict below)
The X (left) values ranges from 1 (right of section or trailing edge) to 0 (left of section or leading edge) and back to 1 (right or trailing edge).
At the junction point of both surfaces, mid data file, when X is close to zero, the ordinate (Ys or right column) should be zero. You need to “filter” your file manually. Excel or Open Office can help. You could also insert a (0,0) coordinate which often doesn’t exist between the last positive Y value and the first negative Y value.
Tools that help to smooth a leading edge: XFOIL has a special built in function and a NACA 4-5-6 digits generator.
Bezier tool in a CAD SW.
Coordinates look right to me, its probably something to do with they way the script on winghopper interprolates them. Unless you see anything here that catches your attention?
That looks pretty funky - I’ve seen that happen before with some foil files. Ultimately, some foil .DATs are just not right. I’ll look into the back end and triple check nothing is off there. Thanks for the heads up guys - i’ll find a better way to foolproof the section import. Keep the feedback coming!
I haven’t tested with a lot of profiles, but as @SoEFoil suggested you need more plotting points in the dat/txt file, so it’s not a big problem.
One thing I did notice as well is that sometimes after you export the CAD file it reverts back to the default wing and you lose all the config data, is there a way to add the wing config to the download so you at least know where you were in the design?
I’m not a specialist. I think it might have too much camber. I’ve just (re) discovered the NACA 1306 (fast) / 1308 (all-round) 1310 (tolerant) 1312 (very tolerant) [NACA 1408 has nice polars too]
Looking for inspiration ? There is this great thread on Kiteforum praising the s-2055 not very cambered either.
