Conceptual Aircraft Design

4Wings

4.1 Overview

The last chapter dealt with the pertinent aspects of aerodynamic considerations of 2D geometries as the basis for the aerodynamic design of aircraft. This and the next two chapters deal with the aerodynamic considerations of 3D geometries, as well as aircraft components. These are studied at the conceptual stage of new aircraft design project.

There are basically two types of geometrical shapes that constitute aircraft components, for example (i) planar bodies meant to deal with force and moments for aircraft to perform, for example, wings, empennage and control surfaces, dealt with in Chapters 4.1 and 6.1 and (ii) bodies of revolution, for example, fuselages, nacelles and so on, dealt with in Chapter 5.

These three Chapters 4, 5, 6 outline the components of aircraft and serve as the building blocks to arrive at aircraft configuration. The objective is to generate aircraft components piece by piece in a Lego/Mechano style and mate them in the way shown in the middle diagram of Figure 2.1. This information serves to develop ‘boilerplate’ template geometries of aircraft components to be put together to generate candidate aircraft configurations as a ‘concept definition’. During the conceptual design phase, these will eventually be sized to ‘concept finalisation’ (typically, planar planform to zoom in/out) with matched engines (Chapter 14) to finalise the design.

This chapter begins with standard definitions of the various parameters of planar surfaces that will ...