GRAPHICAL APPLICATION FOR THE TEACHING OF THE FLOW AROUND AN AIRFOIL IN ENGINEERING DEGREES

We present in this work a graphical tool developed with MATLAB software, which will be part of a complete “virtual laboratory”, with the aim of guiding the students in the study of the flow dynamics around an airfoil. Although this interesting flow field arises as a classical Fluid Mechanics problem, it is not strictly included in the new Mechanical Engineering degree program. Thus, the main goal of the graphical tool that we proposed here is to intuitively present the students the main results of the flow around an airfoil, obtained by means of advanced experimental techniques as well as by numerical simulations. Moreover, the graphical application exposes the theoretical framework of the problem in order to complete the understanding of this type of flow.

The idea of the tool comes from the new concept of teaching in the Bologna Plan, which implies that traditional lectures must be combined with self-learning activities on the student’s side. Therefore, it is necessary to develop a high-quality specific material to provide the students with the required tools to assimilate and revise the theoretical and analytical concepts that are taught during the lectures. This challenge is even bigger in the case of Fluids Mechanics, one of the major engineering branches, because the students have been traditionally taught from a theoretical background although its foundation lays on analytical theories, experiments and numerical simulations. Therefore, it is necessary to use innovative and different resources to overcome the aforementioned difficulties. In particular, the new information technologies might help to develop teaching tools based on graphical interfaces, which could be available on-line for the students giving them the possibility to assimilate and reinforce the acquired knowledge. In this sense, e-learning arises as a powerful tool to meet these demands, and seems to be an attractive and motivating method for the students.

Therefore, the graphical application that we present intends to make easier the understanding of the flow dynamics around an airfoil, supplying the students with a very complete outlook of this problem by means of the three branches of Fluid Mechanics, i.e. theory, numerical simulations and experiments. Furthermore, the experimental and numerical results described in the tool have been previously obtained by the Fluid Mechanics Division at the University of Jaén using advanced techniques, which allow the student to have a first contact with research. As a consequence, this tool arises as an innovative feature not only because of the complete vision of the problem which is offered, but also because it shows the use of experimental and numerical techniques that otherwise would be overlooked. Moreover, it gives the students the option of performing as many lab sessions as they want, encouraging the self-learning process in an appealing way.