Choosing the right Airfoil

Fluid Mechanics never allured me like the rest of the subjects. I took the course only because I had to. But after experiencing it in first person today , I can say that I have taken a special liking for the subject.

So ,  

        I had to find an airfoil shape for the wings. The wings should help the robot take off at very low speeds (approx 1 to 2 m/s). 

The lift needed at takeoff was around 1kgf.

The stall angle needed to be more than the common airfoils used in aircrafts as this bird is expected to do a lot of pitching.

The famous website for airfoil shapes and their data is NACA.

After some research I knew I had to make a balance between lift and maneuverability.

 NACA 2412   seems to be the popular choice of RC planes but the low lift was a problem.

I went hunting for more airfoils , hours went by as I skipped through airfoils; nothing seemed more fit than the NACA 2412.

This is the point where I regretted neglecting fluid mechanics. 

Atlast I decided to modify it. !!

The NACA 2412 belongs to NACA 4 digit series of airfoils: 

the first digit represents the max camber(%)  

the second - max camber position(%)

third and fourth - max thickness (%)

I found that increasing  the camber had a positive effect in Lift .

Since the data of only NACA 2412 was given in the website I had to find them out myself.

Wolfram|Alpha had a widget which found the lift coefficients of NACA 4 digit profiles but it used inviscid assumption and was erroneous at high Angle of Attacks.

Hence I resorted to XFOIL.

It is a simple command line based program which already had the NACA 4 digit and 5 digit profiles.

I just had to input the Reynolds number and the number of Iterations and I got this

(The dotted lines show the results with the inviscid approximation.)
 After varying the camber I ended up selecting NACA 7412.

This is the lift coefficient vs Angle of Attack graph : 

                                                           (Ik thats a messy graph)

Some more study is needed but only after I learn Fluid Mechanics properly. ;)