Effect of geometric variations on the wing rock of blended wing–body aircraft

Abstract

Blended wing–body configurations are anticipated to dominate future transport and military aerospace designs. The departure of the conventional tube-wing configuration has opened several areas of investigation. These designs are susceptible to lateral instability during landing, takeoff, and maneuvering flight despite having improved aerodynamics because of their tailless nature. One of these instabilities, Wing-Rock, poses significant performance and operational difficulties and can potentially cause crashes. Though experimental and numerical studies of the aerodynamics and stability of blended wing–body configurations have been conducted, wing-rock characteristics still need to be identified in the literature. This research aims to investigate these characteristics at low subsonic speeds with varying outboard sweep and geometric twist angles. The study includes a numerical approach based on the rigid body free-vibration method in single roll degree of motion, which uses three-dimensional unsteady Reynolds’ Average Navier Stokes equations, and an analytical approach based on the multiple time scale method, which captures the crucial aspect of the wing rock system. The findings show that the geometrical parameters significantly impact the wing rock characteristics, which are unique to such novel tailless designs.