FE - DCA | Dissertações de Mestrado e Teses de Doutoramento
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Browsing FE - DCA | Dissertações de Mestrado e Teses de Doutoramento by Author "Almeida, Henrique Miguel de"
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- Induced Drag Reduction with a Wing Tip Tail ConfigurationPublication . Almeida, Henrique Miguel de; Silvestre, Miguel Ângelo RodriguesFlight testing is one of the most delicate and important stages of an aircraft development, it is the ultimate way to prove that an aircraft, as well as the design concepts implemented in it are functional. UAVs, being usually cheaper to build than manned aircraft, are a cost effective and safer way to develop an experimental aircraft, in particular to test new concepts and validate them. ln the present dissertation, a new tail configuration concept to reduce the induced drag, where the tail surfaces are placed in the wing tip vortices wake, is experimentally tested through flight testing. The new concept configuration is compared with a conventional baseline configuration, first numerically with a vortex lattice method and then through the flight testing of both the new concept configuration and the conventional baseline. The data acquisition equipment was developed for this work. The flight testing methodology to obtain the aircraft performance, is based in the potential and kinetic energy changes of the aircraft and it is also compared with other methodologies. With this methodology and after 6.5 hours of flight testing data, the concept to reduce the induced drag is vatidated as well as the energy based flight testing methodology. Changes to increase the potential of the present configuration are also suggested based on the results of the numerical study.