Regular Article

Investigation on the effect of leading edge tubercles of sweptback wing at low reynolds number

¹ Department of Mechanical Engineering
² Department of Mechanical Engineering, Anna University Regional Campus, Tirunelveli 627007, India
³ Hindusthan College of Engineering & Technology, Coimbatore 641032, India

^* e-mail: bruceralphin@gmail.com

Received: 28 April 2020
Accepted: 27 November 2020

Abstract

Aerodynamic efficiency of an airplane wing can be improved either by increasing its lift generation tendency or by reducing the drag. Recently, Bio-inspired designs have been received greater attention for the geometric modifications of airplane wings. One of the bio-inspired designs contains sinusoidal Humpback Whale (HW) tubercles, i.e., protuberances exist at the wing leading edge (LE). The tubercles have excellent flow control characteristics at low Reynolds numbers. The present work describes about the effect of tubercles on swept back wing performance at various Angle of Attack (AoA). NACA 0015 and NACA 4415 airfoils are used for swept back wing design with sweep angle about 30°. The modified wings (HUMP 0015 A, HUMP 0015 B, HUMP 4415 A, HUMP 4415 B) are designed with two amplitude to wavelength ratios (η) of 0.1 & 0.24 for the performance analysis. It is a novel effort to analyze the tubercle vortices along the span that induce additional flow energy especially, behind the tubercles peak and trough region. Subsequently, Co-efficient of Lift (C_L), Co-efficient of Drag (C_D) and boundary layer pressure gradients also predicted for modified and baseline (smooth LE) models in the pre & post-stall regimes. It was observed that the tubercles increase the performance of swept back wings by the enhanced C_L/C_D ratio in the pre-stall AoA region. Interestingly, the flow separation region behind the centerline of tubercles and formation of Laminar Separation Bubbles (LSB) were asymmetric because of the sweep.