AERODYNAMIC ANALYSIS OF UiTM’S ENERGY GLIDER WITH FITTED WINGLETS USING CFD SIMULATION

Abstract

Gliders are aircraft with fixed wings that do not depend on an engine to fly. Depending on the design and size of the lifting surface, gliders can fly for long distances. Like other types of aircraft, wings of the glider must be designed in such a way as to provide lift to maintain flight level. The long, slender wings and lightweight design provide gliders with maximum lift-to-drag ratio. The purpose of this study is to determine the aerodynamic characteristics (i.e. lift, drag and moment) of UiTM’s energy glider that has been incorporated with winglets, which are vertical wingtip extensions that can increase the aircraft’s fuel efficiency and cruising range. In this study, the KFm-5a is used as the airfoil profile for the glider’s wing. The glider is modelled using CATIA and the resultant model is then exported to Fluent Ansys, which is a computational fluid dynamic (CFD) analysis software. For the CFD analysis, the flow around the glider’s model is simulated at Reynolds number of 4.7 x 10⁵ and Mach number 0.1 (~35 m/s). The turbulence model used in this study is Spalart-Allmaras due to its efficiency in reducing the complexity of the problem and also the overall simulation time. The aircraft is pitched at a range of angles of attack from -2° until it reaches the stall angle with an interval of 2°. On the whole, the results show that the glider with the winglet has higher maximum lift-to-drag ratio of 13.7 at angle of attack of 4° as compared to the original glider without the winglet that has a maximum lift-to-drag ratio of only 12.4 at the same angle of attack. Nevertheless, the differences of lift and drag forces between these two glider configurations can be taken to be relatively small.