I am currently working on a personal single seat, piston aircraft that I would fly myself and I am currently in a bit of conundrum when it comes to my wing design. In this project, I assigned us in 2 basic groups. The guys that work on the chassis and the guy (me) that works on the aerodynamic surfaces. Namely wing, surface controls, tail and such. It is a standard pull configuration aircraft, tricycle landing gear. My problem here is that I am kind of undecided when it comes to my airfoil of choice, so I thought of giving the forum a go and see if anyone can illuminate or inspire me.
As of now, http://airfoiltools.com/airfoil/details?airfoil=naca643618-il has been my choice, but maybe I am starting to think that other options could be better so let me write here a few specifications that could come in handy regarding the aircraft.
The main body will be build of steel tubing covered either in Aluminium or fabric. This will be the final choice once we calculate how much lift we can actually produce.
The wings and other surfaces will be made out of carbon fiber. I will be the one mainly working on this, and they will be attached to long solid cuboids spanning from one tip of the first wing, through the body and all the way to the tip of the second wing. The shape and dimensions of these cuboids will be determined through a FEA after we have the correct wing profile (so we can play with the variables afterwards or maybe even find better solutions). The wings will either be attached with rivets to the cuboid or with standard well shaped bolts. TBD.
The aircraft is planned to be mostly used at not so great speeds. If we can achieve a takeoff at 16-20 m/s with flaps on it would be fantastic. I would not like the top speed to be anything great either. I mostly would use this in very good still weather to cruise around the fields.
I can afford having an airfoil that is a bit thick, but would like to manage the turbulence that would be created by boundary layer separation in high thickness and/or camber foils. Maybe I will modify a bit my final selection.
The wing will have flaps, in fact it will be a flap that extends at around 35% of the total span of the wing. It will be a modification of the slot and Fowler flap (a sort of optimized approach that mixes both) whose final geometry will of course be dependent on airfoil selection.
P.S : I use Fusion 360 for modeling, Autodesk CFD to calculate the total lift of the full 3D modeled wing/aircraft.