Refinement of the nonplanar aspects of the subsonic doublet-lattice lifting surface method.

Abstract

The initial formulation of the Doublet-Lattice Method has proven theoretically accurate for calculating the interference effects on arbitrary classes of oscillating nonplanar configurations with one known exception: nearly coplanar wing/horizontal-tail combinations. For this class of problems the integration of the kernel across the element loses accuracy. The reason for this loss of accuracy is explained, and a refined method for performing the required integration is presented. Numerical studies using wing-tail configurations are presented to illustrate how well the refined method works. Also a T-tail calculation is repeated to show that calculations using other configurations are unaffected by the refinement.