EFFECT OF VARIABLE CANT ANGLE ON SWEEPBACK WING

Winglets are commonly used drag-reduction and fuel-saving technologies in today’s aviation. The primary purpose of the winglets is to reduce the lift-induced drag, therefore improving fuel efficiency and aircraft performance. Traditional winglets are designed as fixed devices attached at the tips of the wings. However, because they are fixed surfaces, they give their best lift-induced drag reduction at a single design point. In this work, we propose the use of variable cant angle winglets which could potentially allow aircraft to get the best all-around performance (in terms of lift-induced drag reduction), at different angle-of-attack values. This paper describes a XFLR 3-dimensional winglets analysis that was performed on a wing of NACA2412 cross sectional airfoil. The wing has span 2.40 m, root chord 0.180 m, tip chord 0.110 m, sweep angle 5 degree and taper ratio 0.556 and for a winglet NACA 0024 cross-sectional airfoil was considered of max thickness 24 percent at 30 percent chord, max camber 0 percent at 0 percent chord. The present study shows effects of wing without winglet, wing with winglet at cant angle 30, 60, 90. The results obtained from the analysis demonstrate that by carefully adjusting the cant angle, the aerodynamic performance can be improved