An international duo of engineers has proposed revisiting traditional aircraft design in terms of fuel efficiency.
Jeffrey Spedding of the University of Southern California (USA) and Joachim Huissen of the Northwestern University of South Africa have long wanted to develop a more aerodynamic design by eliminating the "tube with wings", but they still did not have experimental data. Now there are those.
They built a simple "three-essence" modular plane. We started with a configuration in which the entire aircraft is a flat wing. Then, to minimize drag, a fuselage was added, followed by a small tail, which essentially "cancels" the aerodynamic disturbance created by the fuselage.
Scientists analyzed airflow and different relative angles of the wings, fuselage and tail to reduce drag (less fuel consumption) and increase lift (so that it was a win-win option).
The results are as follows. The flying wing provides ideal (but impractical - no cargo) baseline performance. The presence of the fuselage allows you to take a payload on board, but immediately reduces lift and increases drag. The correct tail type, however, can restore lift and reduce drag - sometimes to the level of a flying wing.
You will laugh, but in the end the engineers got … a bird: curved wings, a "pot-bellied" fuselage, a tiny tail. Several years ago, a glider with such a tail was successfully tested, on a mono-wing (albeit a jet one) the Swiss Yves Rossi fearlessly dissects, but the matter has not yet reached large and commercial prototypes. But in vain, scientists emphasize, because the current aircraft design, in their opinion, is fundamentally ineffective.
