Preliminary design and performance analysis of a box-wing transport aircraft
The paper aims to present the design phases of a 300 ca. passengers box-wing aircraft, called PrandtlPlane, proposed as an efficient alternative for future air transport. The paper presents the workflow carried out during the project, starting from the definition of Top Level Aircraft Requirements up to the preliminary design of a conservative and improvable baseline configuration , which has been object of high-fidelity assessment in order to compare its performance with a 200 ca. passenger reference conventional aircraft from the same category (ICOA-ARC-4C). In order to better understand the advantages of adopting the box-wing configuration, the comparison also includes a derived version of the PrandtlPlane, designed considering the same passenger amount of the reference conventional aircraft. Finally, the paper shows the studies carried out to improve the baseline configuration in terms of aerodynamics and flight mechanics, describing also the way forward for the next steps for the refinement of the 300 passengers version. The activities here described are part of a research project called PARSIFAL (“Prandtlplane ARchitecture for the Sustainable Improvement of Future AirpLanes”), which has been funded by European Union under the Horizon 2020 Program.
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“Preliminary design and performance analysis of a box-wing transport aircraft,” AIAA 2020-0267. AIAA Scitech 2020 Forum. January 2020.
Aerodynamic analysis and optimization of a boxwing architecture for commercial airplanes
In the present work, the CFD analysis and local shape optimization of a boxwing architecture designed during the early stages of the PARSIFAL project are addressed in order to assess and improve its transonic aerodynamic performance. The assessment of the baseline configuration is carried out by means of high-fidelity RANS computations while an Euler-based workflow is employed for the optimization study. In both cases, CFD computations are supplemented by a far-field drag post-processing to inspect the behavior and the impact of the different drag sources (induced, wave, pressure and viscous dissipation) on the aerodynamic performance. Results obtained from the optimization of local twist and camber parameters for the isolated boxwing lifting-system are presented and discussed. The optimization successfully achieves a great reduction of the compressibility effects affecting the baseline configuration, leading to a substantial improvement of the aerodynamic performance at cruise and higher values of the lift coefficient.
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“Aerodynamic analysis and optimization of a boxwing architecture for commercial airplanes,” AIAA 2020-1285. AIAA Scitech 2020 Forum. January 2020.