Air Craft Winglet Design and Performance: Cant Angle Effect

A winglet is a device used to improve the efficiency of aircraft by lowering the lift induced drag caused by wingtip vortices. It is a vertical or angled extension at the tips of each wing. Winglets improve efficiency by diffusing the shed wingtip vortex, which in turn reduces the drag due to lift and improves the wing's lift over drag ratio Winglets increase the effective aspect ratio of a wing without adding greatly to the structural stress and hence necessary weight of its structure. In this research, a numerical validation procedure (by FLUENT ®, computational fluid dynamics software with The Spalart-Allmaras turbulence model) is described for determination and estimation aerodynamic characteristics of three dimension subsonic rectangular wing (with NACA65 3 218airfoil cross section). It was observed that at the present work a good agreement between the numerical study and the experimental work. This paper describes a CFD 3-dimensional winglets analysis that was performed on a Cessna wing of NACA2412 cross sectional airfoil. The wing has span 13.16 m, root chord 1.857 m, tip chord 0.928 m, sweep angle 11 degree and taper ratio 0.5. The present study shows wing without winglet and wing with winglet at cant angle 0, 30 and 45 degree. A CFD simulation performs by to compare of aerodynamics characteristics of lift coefficient C L , drag coefficient C D and lift to drag ratio, L/D lift, pathlines and pressure contours. The models run at a Mach number of 0.2 at sea level. The pressure and temperature of air at this height are 101.325 kPa and 288.2 K respectively. The results show that the wing with winglet can increase the lift by ratio approximately 12%. The wing with winglet can decrease the drag by ratio approximately 4%. The wing with winglet can increase lift to drag, L/D by about 11% along different phases of flight.