Effect of vorticity around winglets

The purpose of this project is when the aircraft moves through the air, it results into the production of wingtip vortices due to its own lifting. These wingtip vortices are higher as the aircraft lift increases. If winglets are fixed to wingtips, then such wingtip vortex goes down and the aircraft performance will turn out to be better. We has hardly emphasized on the analyses of winglets and performance. When winglets are used, drag coefficient decreases since wingtip vortices are reduced by winglets.

Vorticity magnitude of wing will be checked and compared when winglets are used. For that, one wing model without winglet and two wing models with winglets (wingtip fence, racked wingtip) were created and drawn in CATIA V5 and geometry data gathered from the Airfoil Investigation Database and Boeing website. These models import to ICEM CFD and other required operations like meshing in ICEM CFD, flow boundary conditions were applied in CFX-Pre, solving iterations in CFX-Solver for analyzing and the results are visualized in CFX-Post.

The wing and the wing with winglets performance were analyzed in several angles of attack and the lift and drag coefficients were compared when the aircraft is in take off and cruise. Wingtip vortices and pressure from models were checked, studied and compared. All winglet models are reduces the drag coefficient when compared with wing model. The minimum drag coefficient winglet is considered as the best winglet at different angle of attack in cruise and it will be pointed out at the end of this project. From this analysis, Wingtip Fences is best winglet at several angle of attacks in take off and cruise.