High aspect ratio wing design using the minimum exergy destruction principle

Hayes, David; Pontillo, Alessandro; Yusuf, Sezsy Y; Lone, Mohammad M; Whidborne, James

Abstract

High Aspect Ratio Wings (HARW) may provide the efficiency improvements required for next generation aircraft to meet the environmental and economic challenges faced by the aviation industry. In this paper, the authors describe the development of a short haul HARW aircraft, which results in an increase in the wing span (modern short haul aircraft 34m to XB-2 48m) and aspect ratio (modern short haul aircraft 9.5 to XB-2 18.8) of the aircraft. The geometry is defined using a novel minimum exergy destruction principle, which derives the optimal circulation distribution for an unconstrained wing to be that of a bell shape, in contrast to Prandtl’s optimal elliptic distribution for a constrained span. The exergy based method utilises the laws of thermodynamics, and extends the work of Greene on minimal entropy generating lift distributions. The paper concludes by comparing the XB-2 and modern short haul aircraft in terms of aerodynamic efficiency and also calculates the static and dynamic response of the XB-2 aircraft under aerodynamic loading.

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (published)
• Conference Name: AIAA Scitech 2019 Forum
• Start Date: Jan 7, 2019
• End Date: Jan 11, 2019
• Acceptance Date: Apr 6, 2024
• Online Publication Date: Jan 6, 2019
• Publication Date: Jan 6, 2019
• Deposit Date: Apr 22, 2024
• Pages: 1592
• Book Title: AIAA Scitech 2019 Forum
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2019-1592
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/11888289