Guerrero, J.; Wittkowski, K.; Sanguineti, M. Variable Cant Angle Winglets for Improvement of Aircraft Flight Performance. Preprints2019, 2019070001. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints201907.0001.v1
APA Style
Guerrero, J., Wittkowski, K., & Sanguineti, M. (2019). Variable Cant Angle Winglets for Improvement of Aircraft Flight Performance. Preprints. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints201907.0001.v1
Chicago/Turabian Style
Guerrero, J., Kevin Wittkowski and Marco Sanguineti. 2019 "Variable Cant Angle Winglets for Improvement of Aircraft Flight Performance" Preprints. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints201907.0001.v1
Abstract
Traditional winglets are designed as fixed devices attached at the tips of the wings. The primary purpose of the winglets is to reduce the lift-induced drag, therefore improving aircraft performance and fuel efficiency. However, because winglets are fixed surfaces, they cannot be used to control lift-induced drag reductions or to obtain the largest lift-induced drag reductions at different flight conditions (take-off, climb, cruise, loitering, descent, approach, landing, and so on). In this work, we propose the use of variable cant angle winglets which could potentially allow aircraft to get the best all-around performance (in terms of lift-induced drag reduction), at different flight phases. By using computational fluid dynamics, we study the influence of the winglet cant angle and sweep angle on the performance of a benchmark wing at Mach numbers of 0.3 and 0.8395. The results obtained demonstrate that by adjusting the cant angle, the aerodynamic performance can be improved at different flight conditions.
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
