Aerodynamic Design and Optimization of Bionic Wing Based on Wandering Albatross

Abstract

The aerodynamic characteristics of the wing largely determine the flight performance of the aircraft. In studies of nature, it has been found that albatrosses can travel thousands of miles over the sea, with little flapping of their wings, because of their lift-and-drag properties. In order to further study the aerodynamic performance of albatross wings, this paper extracts the mathematical model of bionic wing according to the shape parameters of a wandering albatross, and selects GOE 174 airfoil as the airfoil of bionic wing by 2D aerodynamic analysis, and finally designs and establishes the three-dimensional model of bionic wing. Considering the individual size differences of wandering albatross and the wing deformation during dynamic flying, the Genetic Algorithm(GA) and Vortex Lattice Method(VLM) were used to optimize the size parameters of wing shape with the lift-drag ratio as the optimization objective. The bionic wings with and without optimization were compared with the flat wings with the same wingspan, wing area and wing type. Vortex Lattice Method and 3D-Panel were used for aerodynamic calculation under the same flight conditions to obtain the relationship between the lift coefficient, drag coefficient, lift-drag ratio of the wings and the Angle of attack, as well as the wing pressure, lift, viscosity and induced drag distribution, respectively. The results show that the bionic wing with optimization has excellent lift-drag characteristics. When the Angle of attack is 7 degrees, the lift coefficient, drag coefficient and lift-drag ratio of the bionic wing with optimization are 0.667, 0.025 and 26.768, respectively. Compared with the bionic wing without optimization and the rectangular wing, the lift-drag ratio increases by 5.71 and 7.87%, respectively.