Assignment

4 High lift systems

Requirements
Personal or group task: personal
Minimum / Maximum number of pages: 8 / 15 (excluding Title page)
Font size: 10 12

Background
The availability of high lift airfoils is one of the key factors in attaining high
performance in take-off and landing conditions. The design of systems with leading
edge and trailing edge devices is complicated due to the strong interaction effects
between the different elements (see ref 1).
As is evinced by results from literature two factors make the design of a high lift
system very difficult:
The limited accuracy with which flow separation can be predicted with
modern CFD codes
The possible occurrence of wake bursting and the associated detrimental
hysteresis effects.

With this in mind, the task of defining an acceptable high lift system becomes non-
trivial. For this reason we will only concentrate on a low fidelity analysis of an airfoil
and a wing equipped with a trailing edge flap and estimate the basic effects.

Task
In order to get some further insight in the interaction effects between elements in a
high lift system perform the following tasks:

1. Read the paper from ref. 1 and describe in your own words the 5 main effects
(as discussed during the lecture) that determine the behaviour of a high lift
system. Please add clear (high quality) sketches that support the text.
2. Find a relevant case in of a main element with flap (2D) in open literature
and provide the lift polar for one or more flap settings as found from the
particular article. Use this model to construct a like-wise high lift system that
consists of a main element and a separate flap based on 2 airfoils in close
proximity. This means that the cove area is completely smoothed out to
enable calculations with low fidelity codes.
3. Use this model to simulate the high lift condition that was found in literature
and discuss possible differences. For this 2D analysis you may use the
JavaFoil application (available on the internet) or any other 2D code of your
preference that is capable of calculating multi-element airfoils.
 4. Determine the ratio between the flap lift (or normal force) coefficient and the
overall lift coefficient. What is the main conclusion that you can draw here?
5. Discuss in how far you find the effects that were discussed in item 1.
6. Compare the results with a like-wise model that has a plain flap (so no slot
flow) with the same airfoil layout and flap setting. This analysis may also be
done with XFOIL. Compare the results with that from item 4 and discuss
them shortly.
7. Compare the results from item 3 and 6 with that from an engineering
approach as discussed in [2]. In this case the lift change due to a deployed
flap can be estimated by:
2
! !! = 1 + 0.77 ! ! !
57.3

8. Optional: Compare the flap effects of the 2D airfoils with that of a typical 3D
rectangular wing of aspect ratio 10, in case of a part span flap. What is the
!
effect of the flap span to wing span ratio, !! .

References
1. A.M.O. Smith. "High-Lift Aerodynamics", Journal of Aircraft, Vol. 12, No. 6
(1975), pp. 501-530.
2. E. Torenbeek, Synthesis of subsonic airplane design, ISBN-13: 978-
9024727247