Effects of Taper Ratio on Aircraft Wing Aerodynamic Parameters: A Comperative Study

Abstract

Wing design is one of the most important tasks for a designer to overcome during an aircraft design process. Therefore, a designer need to optimize so many wing geometrical parameters with the aim of obtaining an efficient wing geometry complying with requirements of the design. Taper ratio is one of these parameters, which is the ratio of root and tip chord lengths of a wing. In this study, firstly, a high aspect ratio rectangular aircraft wing was numerically investigated in terms of some aerodynamic parameters including induced drag coefficient, Oswald efficiency factor and lift coefficient together with its span-wise distribution by means of XFLR5 computational fluid dynamics program. The assessment of mesh accuracy of the program was done at the beginning of the analyses. Later on, with the aim of observing the effects of taper ratio on aircraft wing aerodynamic parameters, the revised versions of the wing, which have the taper ratios from 0.2 to 1.2 (with the increment of 0.2) were analyzed. In conclusion, depending on the analyses results, the wings having different taper ratios were compared in terms of obtained aerodynamic parameters and span-wise lift distributions. Moreover, tip vortices of each wing, together with their sizes, were obtained and also compared.

Keywords

• Aircraft wing design,taper ratio,lift distribution,induced drag coefficient

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