Low Reynolds Number Fowler Flap Design

• Autor(a) principal: Oliveira, André da Silva
• Data de Publicação: 2017
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.6/7916
• topic: Baixo Número de Reynolds; Cfd; Flape Fowler; Domínio/Área Científica::Engenharia e Tecnologia::Engenharia Aeronáutica

Air Cargo Challenge is an international competition promoting innovation in the field of small scale unmanned aircraft development, evaluating the participating aircraft through performance indicators such as maximum payload, and limiting some of its characteristics such as maximum wingspan and propulsion system. Given the frequent participation of Department of Aerospace Sciences from University of Beira Interior in this competition, and considering the lack of information concerning the use of high lift devices for low Reynolds number applications (60,000<????<500,000), a Fowler flap was studied based on an airfoil previously used at this competition. For this flap design process, Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) methods were used through the open-source software OpenFOAM. Afterwards, an actuation mechanism prototype was designed for the operation of this device. The flap obtained with this study produced significant performance improvements over the original airfoil, with an increase in ???? from 1.86 to 2.96. As would be expected, from the use of a Fowler flap, the pitching coefficient created by the airfoil, ????, was intensified, with its value varying from -0.251 on the clean airfoil to -0.694 on the flapped airfoil. The actuation mechanism prototype designed in this study allowed for a satisfactory movement during the flap’s deployment, managing at the same time to maintain a compact size that allows it to be fully contained inside the wing when retracted, avoiding, in this way, any losses in performance due to parasitic drag from the incorporation of the flap.