A THEORY FOR THE LOW-SPEED AERODYNAMICS OF STRAIGHT AND SWEPT WINGS WITH FLOW SEPARATION

Abstract
A mathematical theory is developed for the low speed aerodynamics of rectangular wings with side edge separation. This is then extended to wings with sweptback leading edges (and straight trailing edges) by representing the actual wing as a system of elementary rectangular wings of varying aspect ratio. Thus, in the limit, steady separation along the entire leading edge is approximated, and the theory leads to an iterative computational procedure for calculating the aero dynamic characteristics of sweptback wings with leading-edge separation. Calculations are presented which demonstrate convergence of the method for both rectangular and delta wings, both with and without iteration on the shedding angles of the separated vortices. Comparisons with experiment are also presented for aspect ratios up to five, and it is found that for rectangular wings the calculated normal forces using one wing element are in all cases within 10% of experiment but the calculated shedding angles are unrealistically high. For delta wings, the high shed ding angles evidently cause high predicted normal forces.

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