Investigation of Flow across a Symmetrical Airfoil with Backward Facing Step

Airfoil designers are in continuous pursuit of airfoils with the highest Lift Coefficient. One way to improve the Lift Coefficient is to introduce a backward facing step at the airfoil. This paper reports on a CFD studies to assess the effect of introducing backward facing step in NACA 0012 airfoil. Results show that introducing the backward facing step has improved the Lift Coefficient for Reynolds's number of 500000 over 15AoA. The CFD results were validated by comparing them to available experimental result and good agreement was reported.