On wing–body interference in supersonic flow

Abstract

Although the theory of supersonic inviscid flow past thin wings and slender bodies has received an enormous amount of attention in recent years, comparatively little attention has been paid to the interaction between wings and finite bodies. The principal reason stems from the extensive numerical work that has to be done in order to form a detailed picture of the flow properties—even with the present generation of highspeed computers the student of this problem is faced with a formidable task. The main effort in this interaction problem has been put into the special case when the body is a circular cylinder symmetrically disposed towards the oncoming flow, and here Nielsen (1951) and Stewartson (1951, unpublished) have shown that a formal solution can be obtained in a simple way in terms of Laplace transforms. Interpretation of these formulae however was still a formidable task, but has been greatly facilitated by the publication of an extensive set of tables of the basic functions (Nielsen 1957). Using these tables a number of workers (Randall 1965, Chan and Sheppard 1965, Treadgold, unpublished, and others) have successfully computed pressure distributions on the wing and the body, except for the neighbourhoods of the lines separating the interaction regions from the remainder of the wing and body. The aim of this paper is to provide formulae for the pressure distributions in these neighbourhoods in order to enable the solutions already obtained to be completed.