Winglets are commonly used drag-reduction and fuel-saving technologies in today’s aviation. The primary purpose of the winglets is to reduce the lift-induced drag, therefore improving fuel efficiency and aircraft performance. Traditional winglets are designed as fixed devices attached at the tips of the wings. However, because they are fixed surfaces, they give their best lift-induced drag reduction at a single design point. In this work, we propose the use of variable cant angle winglets which could potentially allow aircraft to get the best all-around performance (in terms of lift-induced drag reduction), at different angle-of-attack values. By using computational fluid dynamics, we study the influence of the winglet cant angle and sweep angle in the performance of a benchmark wing at a Mach number of 0.8395. The results obtained demonstrate that by carefully adjusting the cant angle, the aerodynamic performance can be improved at different angles of attack.

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Traditional winglets are designed as fixed devices attached at the tips of the wings. The primary purpose of the winglets is to reduce the lift-induced drag, therefore improving aircraft performance and fuel efficiency. However, because winglets are fixed surfaces, they cannot be used to control lift-induced drag reductions or to obtain the largest lift-induced drag reductions at different flight conditions (take-off, climb, cruise, loitering, descent, approach, landing, and so on). In this work, we propose the use of variable cant angle winglets which could potentially allow aircraft to get the best all-around performance (in terms of lift-induced drag reduction), at different flight phases. By using computational fluid dynamics, we study the influence of the winglet cant angle and sweep angle on the performance of a benchmark wing at Mach numbers of 0.3 and 0.8395. The results obtained demonstrate that by adjusting the cant angle, the aerodynamic performance can be improved at different flight conditions.

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