At present, there is considerable interest in supercritical wing
technology for the development of aircraft designed to fly near the
speed of sound. The basic principle is the suppression of boundary layer
separation by shifting the shock waves that occur on the wing toward the
trailing edge and making them as weak as possible. The purpose of this
report is to make available to the engineering public mathematical
methods for the design of supercritical wings. These methods depend on
the numerical solution of the partial differential equations of
two-dimensional gas dynamics. The main contribution is a computer
program for the design of shockless transonic airfoils using the
hodograph transformation and analytic continuation into the complex
domain. Another contribution is a program for the analysis of transonic
flow with shocks past an airfoil at off-design conditions. In our design
work we include a turbulent boundary layer correction. Part I of the
paper is devoted to a description of the mathemati- cal theory and need
not be studied by those primarily concerned with running the programs.
Part II is a manual for users of our programs which is independent of
the theoretical part. In Part III and in Appendices II and III we give
numerical examples and discuss computa- tional results. The main
substance of the report, however, is contained in the listing of the
computer programs themselves in Appendix IV. We have used the Fortran
language throughout and we have included numerous comment cards in the
listing.