OK so if anyone was following the “How Important is Lift in Fins?” thread a while back, there was much discussion on fins, foils, drag, lift etc.
I’ve just finished a report for the CFD investigation of surfboard fins, thruster and single fin setup. Thought you guys might be interested
in a read. It’s a qualitative rather than quantitative report, so its based more on theory and investigation rather than number crunching.
You can download a copy of the report by clicking here (2MB).
Thanks go out to the fin masters… Blakestah, Halcyon, Bill Barnfield, Tom Bloke, DJ craftee, sabs, and especially TomatDuam for his help.
After the report, there is some extra images and animations from the results by clicking here.
I’d like to hear any thoughts and reviews, but its only a humble opinion on a few things, its not meant to be exact fact, so hopefully it can help a few and perhaps give some people ideas for further work.
It looks like you've made quite an effort. I've printed it out and will read it in it's entirety later when I'm too tired to polish this mold any more.
Fair enough about the 3.2, I can’t remember where I got 3.5… not much I can do now.
Yeah, with any of the images, its so much better to have a 3D model infront on you so you can rotate it, change perspectives etc… gives you a much better understanding of it…
Thats partly the reason I made the website in order to give a bit more …
I’ll get some more images up, and perhaps use eDrawings to give you a 3D model you can play around…
As for now, I’m off to an island 18km off Perth for 4 days to rest and relax with my mates!
Thats great work Lavz, thanks for sharing it with us.
I was chating to a friend about your paper yesterday and he sent me this. Could’nt see it in your resourse section so if you haven’t already seen it, thought you and the other SFFs might find it interesting, a lot of this suff gives me brain ache, I’m trying to get my head round it, but i’m more of a practical person than an engineer or scientist,
That has perhaps the best visualization of a vortex I’ve seen. Not a tip vortex, but a low pressure side vortex, in figure 4, at all but the highest AOAs. It also shows the extent of flow separation near the base. Stall angle close to 20 degrees AOA, that’s a nice one.
The authors have the visual, but don’t give much discussion to the low pressure vortex and its impact on lift…which is too bad. But a picture is worth 1000 words. You wanna know what a MVG would need to interact with - it is RIGHT THERE.
