Wing/body interference flow investigation

Abstract

The concept of using parametric bicubic patch surface definitions with bilinear vorticity or biquadratic doublet distributions was tested by modeling the vortex sheet and predicting its shape numerically in the vicinity of the wing. For the purpose of computing induced velocities, it was shown that higher order of vorticity would not improve the truncation error. The bilinear distribution, used to model the tip vorticity, was satisfactory but gave rise to some difficulty. The bicubic geometric surface representation proved very suitable for curved surfaces such as the rolled-up vortex sheet, with the surface fit scheme failing only for complex wings, far downstream beyond the region of concern.