Abstract
Amphibious aircraft designers face challenges to improve takeoffs and landings on both water and land, with water-takeoffs being relatively more complex for analyses. Reducing the water-takeoff distance via the use of hydrofoils was a subject of interest in the 1970s, but the computational power to assess their designs was limited. A preliminary computational design framework is developed to assess the performance and effectiveness of hydrofoils for amphibious aircraft applications, focusing on the water-takeoff performance. The design framework includes configuration selections and sizing methods for hydrofoils to fit within constraints from a flying-boat amphibious aircraft conceptual design for general aviation. The position, span, and incidence angle of the hydrofoil are optimized for minimum water-takeoff distance with consideration for the longitudinal stability of the aircraft. The analyses and optimizations are performed using water-takeoff simulations, which incorporate lift and drag forces with cavitation effects on the hydrofoil. Surrogate models are derived based on 2D computational fluid dynamics simulation results to approximate the force coefficients within the design space. The design procedure is evaluated in a case study involving a 10-seater amphibious aircraft, with results indicating that the addition of the hydrofoil achieves the purpose of reducing water-takeoff distance by reducing the hull resistance.
Highlights
Amphibious aircraft have the potential to play an important role in passenger transport as part of general aviation, in short-range flights [1]
At the required speeds for water-takeoff, which are bound to be higher for larger aircraft, cavitation is almost an inevitable phenomenon as the cavitation number reduces with increase in dynamic pressure underwater, indicating that supercavitating hydrofoils are the only viable solution
Consider Cartesian coordinates indicating the position of the aerodynamic center of the hydrofoil where the origin is set at the aircraft center of gravity (CG), assumed to be located at 33% MAC of the wing aft of the leading edge for the following analysis
Summary
Amphibious aircraft have the potential to play an important role in passenger transport as part of general aviation, in short-range flights [1]. The takeoff and landing flight segments for amphibious aircraft present greater complications than ones in general aviation aircraft design because of the increased complexities involving water analyses The subscripts h f , h, and w will denote the parameters corresponding to hydrofoil, horizontal tail, and wing, respectively
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