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How does wing thickness affect lift?
Increasing the thickness will increase the lift. Increasing the area will increase the lift. Increasing the camber will increase the lift. A symmetric airfoil, or even a flat plate at angle of attack, will generate lift.
What type of airfoils are generally used in flying wing aircraft?
reflexed airfoil
The solution is use of positive cambered airfoil with negative camber at trailing edge to neutralize pitching moment at zero angle of attack. This type of an airfoil is called reflexed airfoil and is considered to be best suited for flying wing configurations.
What is the difference between a wing and an airfoil?
The primary lifting surface of an aircraft is its wing. The wing has a finite length called its wing span. If the wing is sliced with a plane parallel to the x-z plane of the aircraft, the intersection of the wing surfaces with that plane is called an airfoil.
Why are thinner sections of airfoils more effective?
Thinner airfoil sections cause less drag simply because they disturb airflow less. Thinner sections down to 10% have a higher maximum lift coefficient, which helps both near stall and during maneuvering: A section with a higher maximum lift coefficient will show more aileron effectiveness, too.
How is the shape of an airfoil different for each slice?
This airfoil shape can be different if the slice is taken at different locations on the wing. However, for any given slice, we have a given airfoil. We can now think of the airfoil as an infinitely long wing that has the same cross sectional shape. Such a wing (airfoil) is called a two dimensional (2-D) wing.
How to compare a wing to a wing design?
It would be clearer to look at a polar of CL plotted against CD; the best point of comparison is to look at the drag generated at the same CL, not the same angle of attack (because the zero-lift angle of attack will change with wing design as well).
What makes a wing have a higher coefficient of drag?
I then did VLM2 analysis on both at 7 m/s, and used the same airfoil on both. surprisingly, the wing with the thinner wingtip chord had a higher coefficient of drag (which i believe leads to higher drag). How come?