A Novel Method for Maximum Lift Prediction in High-Lift Configurations

Many decisions in the preliminary design steps of an aircraft are very hard to take, due to a lot of unknown variables at this stage. These early decisions can be made more reliable by testing different configurations by numerical methods repetitively. Therefore it is very important to have a rapid, reliable and particularly easy to implement numerical tool. One of the most important steps in aerodynamic configuration development is design and sizing of the high lift devices. The main criterion for this design is lift increment that a particular configuration can produce. Therefore, it is very important to adequately estimate the maximum lift coefficient for a flapped wing at highly deflected flap configurations.This paper tries to introduce a novel numerical-empirical method for estimation of lift generation capability of a specific high lift device configuration. However, drag production estimation is not in the scope of this paper. In this method the linear portion of the lift curve is derived numerically, while the curved near stall region is estimated through empirical methods. The results are compared with some experimental data to show the method validity.