Eventos Anais de eventos
COBEM 2021
26th International Congress of Mechanical Engineering
CFD Study Around Tandem Wings for Application in EVTOL Aircraft
Submission Author:
Leonardo Breitenbach , RS
Co-Authors:
Leonardo Breitenbach, Marco Antonio Sampaio Ferraz de Souza, João Luiz Rizzatti
Presenter: Leonardo Breitenbach
doi://10.26678/ABCM.COBEM2021.COB2021-1023
Abstract
In recent years, different tandem wing configurations have been considered for a new class of aerial vehicle, EVTOL (Electric Vertical Take-Off and Landing) aircraft. These aircraft are characterized by having electric propulsion and making vertical takeoff and landing. Currently, several companies in the aeronautical industry have sought to make this type of vehicle feasible for urban air mobility. The objective of this work is to study through CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) different tandem wing configurations seeking to evaluate their aerodynamic efficiencies with large horizontal spacing and positive vertical spacing for an application focused on EVTOL aircraft concepts. In this context, the present work presents numerical simulations performed with the use of the commercial software Ansys Fluent 19.2 for six configurations, where the values of the horizontal distance between the wings were varied, as well as the dihedral of the rear wing and the aspect ratio of the front wing. Computational analyzes were performed by solving the Navier-Stokes equations with Reynolds means and using the Spalart-Allmaras equation turbulence model, for a Reynolds number of 3.33x10^6, Mach number of 0.14 and for flow angles varying between -2° and 6°. The results show that the front wing causes great interference in the flow around the rear wing, which worsens with the increase in the flow angle. In all cases studied, changes in efficiency are observed with the variation of the horizontal spacing, where the largest spacing favored the efficiency of the rear wing while the smallest spacing favored the efficiency of the front surface. The parameter of greatest influence analyzed was the dihedral angle applied to the rear wing, which causes a gradual increase in the vertical distance between the front wing and the rear wing in the direction from the root to the tip. As a conclusion, the geometries analyzed in this work were able to generate the effects predicted in the theory and, in addition, they have compact proportions, which is precisely an important characteristic for an EVTOL aircraft, therefore, the indications of efficiency increase and reduction pointed out in this work can be used as guidelines for future studies.
Keywords
aerodynamic efficiency, CFD, EVTOL, Tandem wings
