Airplane Wing Design for the Cruise condition of Mach 0.78

Aim of Project

Design and validate a wing-body combination for the following flight conditions, assuming that the final aircraft design has a horizontal tail to produce stabilizing and trimming aerodynamic forces and moments to avoid/reduce pitching moments or pitch stability.

Flight conditions

• Design Critical Mach number = 0.78

• Design Altitude = 35,000 ft

• Design Lift = 110,000 lbm

• Wingspan (tip-to-tip) = 100 ft

• Fuselage length= 115 ft

• Fuselage Diameter = 11 ft

• Wing-Fuselage Junction point from nose = 45 ft

Takeaway from Project

This project helped realize how camber, thickness, twist, angle of attack and geometry are all affecting each other and therefore multiple iterations are needed to reach a design condition which leads to many hours being spent iterating and refining parameters of a wing design. This shows how VORLAX would have changed the work of aircraft design as previously there would have been no such computational method to do this easily.

Software Used

• VORLAX -Vortex Lattice Method

• EXCEL -VBA

Project Completed - December, 2019