Verification Study of Low and Higher-Order Potential Based Panel Methods for 2D Foils

This paper presents a Verification study for one low order and two higher-order panel methods based on the perturbation potential formulation proposed by Morino. Airfoils with known analytical solutions were selected to assess the difficulties in the application of a Verification procedure to a boundary element method. The results show that the higherorder methods are superior to the low order method with regard to grid convergence order and smallness of the error. However, determination of a consistent value of the asymptotic order of accuracy was not always possible. Moreover, error estimates based on three-grid results for panel densities typical for practical applications were shown to be misleading in several cases.