Analysis of Stall Aerodynamics of a Swept Wing with Laminar-Flow Glove

Abstract

Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes computational-fluid-dynamics analysis was conducted to study the low-speed stall aerodynamics of a business jet’s swept wing modified with a laminar-flow wing glove. The stall aerodynamics of the gloved wing were analyzed and compared with the unmodified wing for the flight speed of 120 kt and altitude of 2300 ft above mean sea level. A polyhedral finite-volume unstructured Navier–Stokes computational-fluid-dynamics code was used in the analysis. This computational-fluid-dynamics code was first validated for wing stall predictions using the wing–body geometry from the First AIAA Computational Fluid Dynamics High-Lift Prediction Workshop. It was found that the computational-fluid-dynamics code under consideration can produce results that are within the scattering of other computational-fluid-dynamics codes considered at the workshop. In particular, the polyhedral computational-fluid-dynamics code was able to predict wing stall for the AIAA wing–body geometry to within 1 deg of angle of attack as compared to benchmark wind-tunnel test data. Computational-fluid-dynamics results show that the addition of the laminar-flow wing glove causes the gloved wing to stall much earlier than the unmodified wing. Furthermore, the gloved wing has a different stall characteristic than the clean wing, with no sharp lift dropoff at stall for the gloved wing.