Suitability of the NACA 0012 for aircrafts

v_arsha

Hello,
I wanted to know how suitable is a NACA 0012 airfoil, in order to use it in commercial aircrafts?
I mean to say, what are basically its advantages and disadvantages.
And where it can be used.

Thank you very much

boneh3ad

Well it is suitable to a degree. It doesn't have any camber so it's L/D could be better for certain parts of the flight profile.

The real issue is that, in general, the NACA 0012 is a very basic airfoil that is a good academic exercise, but with modern design software and manufacturing techniques, it is easy to design much more advanced and better performing airfoil for real aircraft.

RandomGuy88

Probably not so great for commercial jets because they are traveling at transonic speeds and the 0012 is not designed for that flight regime. Supercritical airfoils are better to reduce wave drag.

viscousflow

v_arsha, just about all commercial uses of the Naca 4 series airfoils were abandoned 60 to 70 years ago. The reason being is the bad L/D characteristics bonehead mentioned. This could be translated visually as a very small drag bucket. Also, these airfoils were only designed with thickness location for lift in mind (if I remember correctly), and not high/low pressure regions which also affects CD. If you read "Theory of Wing Sections" by Abbot and Von Doenhoff, they have the complete story.

Essentially uses of the NACA 4 and 5 series have been dropped and only the 6-series (and its modified versions) has been found suitable for commercial uses.