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Technical Paper

Numerical Simulations of Tandem-Airfoil Aerodynamics

1996-05-01
961295
Analysis of tandem wing aircraft configurations has been of interest to the aerospace community since the early 1970's. The theoretical performance gains from the use of two similarly-sized wings make this unusual configuration an enticing option for future aircraft designs. In this investigation, a two-dimensional Navier-Stokes analysis previously developed for internal flow geometries has been extended to external flow geometries. The modified flow analysis was validated against two sets of experimental data. A series numerical simulations were then performed for a tandem-airfoil configuration in which the stagger (chord-wise distance between the mid-chord of each airfoil) was varied. At each stagger position, the aerodynamic flow field was investigated at several negative and positive incidence angles. The predicted results indicate that (for moderate-to-large stagger distances) the aft airfoil performs similar to the fore airfoil at lower angles of attack.
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