After receiving some great advice here, I set out to create my first diagrams!
I am trying to recreate this type of image in Inkscape:
Inkscape was suggested as a good starting point and it's free, otherwise there is really no particular reason I am using it.
So far I have used Matplotlib in python to create some of the elements of the figure:
which I then save as a .svg and open up in Inkscape. I'm not sure this is the best way to do it, but it's a start. One thing I can't get my head around is that I can open a .svg file fine with Inkscape, but I can't import another to the same canvas- it just imports a blank 'box' that I can drag around...Not sure how to resolve this.
I then attempted to starting drawing the boundary layers (the grey filled part of the picture) using some Bézier curves and fill but I didn't get a good result. Basically I'm not sure how to proceed to
- 'Tilt' the velocity profiles and to mirror/extend them as in the picture.
- Duplicate the airfoil system and make it mesh together nicely with the profiles.
- Insert the arrows in the profiles.
- Import .svg files so that they show up on the canvas!
Any help would be much appreciated.