The purpose of the present paper is to determine numerically the effect of the shape of the nozzle of the air-cushion pad on the flow behavior near the nozzle. In the present paper, a new technique applied to the vortex method is proposed for case of calculations of various nozzle shapes : the fundamental shape of the nozzle is mapped conformally and the panel method is applied to various shapes of the nozzle exit in the mapping plane. The numerical calculation is compared with previous experimental results. Numerical results show that the velocity distribution at the nozzle exit agrees fairly well with experimental one and the global feature of streamlines is similar to experimental ones. The pressure distribution on the surface of strips oscillates remarkably due to the existence of discrete vortices near their surface, but it is pointed out that the flow is steady, in a sense of time average, except a few early stages and the pressure gap between the cushion chamber and the outside of the jet is shown.
