TRANSONIC DRAG REDUCTION ON SUPERCRITICAL WING SECTION USING SHOCK CONTROL BUMPS

Two-dimensional and three-dimensional shock control contour bumps are designed for a supercritical wing section with the aim of transonic wave drag reduction. The supercritical airfoil （NASA SC （02）-0714） is selected considering the fact that most modern jet transport aircrafts that operate in the transonic flow regime （cruise at transonic speeds） employ supercritical airfoil sections. Here it is to be noted that a decrease in the transonic wave drag without loss in lift would result in an increased lift to drag ratio, which is a key range parameter that can potentially increase both the range and endurance of the aircraft. The major geometric bump parameters such as length, height and span are altered for both the two-dimensional and three-dimensional bumps in order to obtain the optimum location and shape of the bump. Once an optimum standalone three-dimensional bump is acquired, an array of bumps is manually placed spanwise of an unswept supercritical wing and analyzed under fully turbulent flow conditions. Different configurations are tested with varying three-dimensional bump spacing in order to determine the contribution of bump spacing on overall performance. The results show a 14% drag reduction and a consequent 16% lift to drag ratio rise at the design Mach number for the optimum arrangement of bumps along the wing span.

Pressure distribution guided supercritical wing optimization

Pressure distribution is important information for engineers during an aerodynamic design process. Pressure Distribution Oriented(PDO) optimization design has been proposed to introduce pressure distribution manipulation into traditional performance dominated optimization.In previous PDO approaches, constraints or manual manipulation have been used to obtain a desirable pressure distribution. In the present paper, a new Pressure Distribution Guided(PDG) method is developed to enable better pressure distribution manipulation while maintaining optimization efficiency. Based on the RBF-Assisted Differential Evolution(RADE) algorithm, a surrogate model is built for target pressure distribution features. By introducing individuals suggested by suboptimization on the surrogate model into the population, the direction of optimal searching can be guided. Pressure distribution expectation and aerodynamic performance improvement can be achieved at the same time. The improvements of the PDG method are illustrated by comparing its design results and efficiency on airfoil optimization test cases with those obtained using other methods. Then the PDG method is applied on a dual-aisle airplane’s inner-board wing design. A total drag reduction of 8 drag counts is achieved.

Shock control bump optimization for a low sweep supercritical wing

Shock control bumps are a promising technique in reducing wave drag of civil transport aircraft flying at transonic speeds.This paper investigates the optimization of 3D shock control bumps on a supercritical wing with a sweep angle of 16°at the1/4 chord.A similar supercritical wing with a higher sweep angle of 24.5°at the 1/4 chord has been adopted as a baseline for the study.Numerical results show that the drag coefficient of the low sweep wing with the optimized 3D shock control bumps is reduced below that for the high sweep wing,indicating shock control bumps can be used as an effective means to reduce the wave drag caused by reducing the wing sweep angle.From the point of view of the wing structure design,lower sweep angle will also bring the benefits of weight reduction,resulting in further fuel reduction.

Numerical study of a supercritical airfoil/wing with variable-camber technology

Variable-camber technology is considered an effective way to adaptively improve the aerodynamic performance of aircraft under various flight conditions.This paper studies the aerodynamic characteristics of the trailing-edge variable-camber technology by means of Computational Fluid Dynamics(CFD)and a drag decomposition method.Trailing-edge variable-camber technology can be simply realized by the continuous deflection of the flaps and ailerons of a wing.A supercritical airfoil is used to study the two-dimensional effect of variable-camber technology,and a wide-body airplane model is used to validate the three-dimensional improvement in the wing’s airfoil made by variable-camber technology.An optimization strategy for airfoil that incorporates variable-camber technology is proposed.The optimization results demonstrate that the proposed method can obtain better results than the traditional segregated shape optimization.