Numerical prediction of blended wing body aerodynamic characteristics at subsonic speed

Abstract

The need for high performance and green aircraft has brought the blended wing (BWB) aircraft concept to the centre of interest for many researchers. BWB is a type of aircraft characterized by a complex blending geometry between fuselage and wing. Recently, many researches had been performed to unlock its aerodynamic complexity that is still not well understood. In this paper, aerodynamic characteristic of a baseline BWB configuration derived from simple conventional aircraft configuration was analysed using the Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes computational fluid dynamics (CFD) solver. The main objectives of this work are to predict the aerodynamic characteristics of the BWB concept at steady flight conditions and at various pitch angles. The results obtained are then compared against a simple conventional aircraft configuration (CAC). The results show that the BWB configuration used has 24% higher L/D ratio than the CAC. The increment to the L/D however is mainly due to lower drag than the improvement in the lift