CFD Analysis of the Tractor Propulsion Concepts for an Inverted Joined Wing Airplane

Efficiency is a crucial parameter for an airplane to reduce both cost of operations and emission of pollutants. There are several airplane concepts that potentially allow for increasing the efficiency. A few of them were not investigated thoroughly enough yet. The inverted joined wing configuration, with the upper wing in front of the lower one is an example of such concept. Therefore, a project consisting of development of an experimental scaled demonstrator, and its wind tunnel and flight testing, was undertaken by consortium: Institute of Aviation, Warsaw University of Technology, Air Force Institute of Technology and a MSP company. Results led to a conclusion, that the inverted joined wing configuration allows to build an airplane with excellent performance, but its advantage against the conventional airplane is marginal because of large trimming drag of the configuration with relatively high position of the thrust vector in pusher configuration. It was applied because the demonstrator was a flying model of manned airplane and the tractor configuration would affect the pilot’s field of observation. However, in case of the UAV, this reason becomes insignificant. Therefore two configurations of tractor propulsion were tested to see, if their performance is better than the performance of original design.