Mesure de l'impact de la technologie d'aile déformable sur les performances en croisière de l'avion d'affaire Cessna Citation X

Abstract

This thesis presents an overview of the amount of fuel that could be saved by using a morphing wing system on the Cessna Citation X. To carry out this study, numerical models able to give such results on the reference aircraft or on the morphed-one were designed. Two morphing-wing systems were proposed and modeled; one on the wing, and the other one on the horizontal stabilizer. On the wing, the proposed system is a morphing winglet with 3 degrees of freedom. The geometries of the winglet were searched for each combination of angles of attack (from -2 to 8 degrees) and Mach numbers (from 0.6 to 0.9). For each combination, a Particle Swarm Optimization algorithm (PSO) was used to define the optimum positions of the winglet. The optimization criterion used requires that the geometry of the winglet should allow the aircraft to maintain its original lift coefficient, but to reduce its drag coefficient. By studying only the aerodynamic aspect of this winglet, a benefit was observed for each of the static flight conditions, with an average gain of 10.8 lb/h on the fuel consumption. Finally, by simulating several cruise scenarios, fuel reductions of up to 2.14% could be observed. On the horizontal stabilizer, it has been suggested that by morphing the airfoil of the horizontal stabilizer one could balance the aircraft without requiring an angle of rotation from the trimmable horizontal stabilizer (THS). To model this morphed stabilizer, an airfoil generator was designed using the Bézier-Parsec BP3434 parameterized curve method. The parameters of the generator were then subjected to a genetic algorithm responsible for finding the shape of the airfoil which makes it possible to balance the aircraft without requiring any rotational movement. For each of the 44 static flight conditions tested, an airfoil able of balancing the aircraft was found. Furthermore, a gain of about 50 lb/h could be found on the average fuel consumption. This study led to the design of morphing-wing systems that reduce fuel requirements. However, only the aerodynamic aspect of the devices was taken into account using simplified calculation methods. As future work, it would be interesting to take into account the weight added by the systems, and thus to check the trend of the results obtained with more accurate aerodynamic computations.

Date	27 Sept 2018
Original language	French
Awarding Institution	École de technologie supérieure
Supervisor	Ruxandra Botez (Supervisor)