Title: The dynamics of supersonic flow past a new cusped leading edge airfoil

Authors: Saif Akram; Nadeem Hasan

Addresses: Department of Mechanical Engineering, National Institute of Technology Durgapur, M.G. Avenue, Durgapur-713209, West Bengal, India ' Department of Mechanical Engineering, Aligarh Muslim University, Aligarh-202001, Uttar Pradesh, India

Abstract: A new family of cusped leading edge airfoil with great implications in supersonic aircraft design has been proposed in this work. Numerical investigation of unsteady, viscous and laminar compressible flow past the new cusped leading edge airfoil and a conventional biconvex airfoil with the same maximum thickness is carried out and a systematic comparison of the aerodynamic parameters are reported. The value of Reynolds number is held constant which is 5 × 10⁵ and the Mach number is varied from 1.25 to 2.13. The results are computed at three different angles of attack given as α = 0°, α = 10° and α = 20°. The comparison of aerodynamic parameters of the new airfoil with that of conventional biconvex supersonic airfoil shows that the new airfoil is much superior to the conventional airfoil. The L/D ratio of the new airfoil is higher than the biconvex circular-arc airfoil for almost all the flight conditions.

Keywords: cusped leading edge airfoil; CFD; drag reduction; supersonic flow.

DOI: 10.1504/PCFD.2024.135636

Progress in Computational Fluid Dynamics, An International Journal, 2024 Vol.24 No.1, pp.1 - 28

Received: 11 Jun 2022
Accepted: 21 Nov 2022
Published online: 20 Dec 2023 *

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