AERODYNAMIC AND

STRUCTURAL .
aNALYSIS OF WINGLETS

Project report.
Under the guidance of
M Tirapataiah

Dapartment of Aeronautical
Engineering
Mahaveer Institute of science and
Technology
 TEAM MEMBERS.

MOHD SAMEER -
24E35A2109
DASYAM LOKESH - 24E31A2109
MACHARLA AKSHAYA - 24E35A2105
HARSHA VARDHAN - 24E31A2105
Abstract:
Winglets are considered as a
powerful means of improving fuel
efficiency for modern aircrafts. It is
defined as the small fins or vertical
extensions at the end of wing. Winglet
improves aircraft efficiency by reducing
drag which is being induced by the
vortices generated at the tip of the wing.
This type of device usually increases the
effective aspect ratio of the wing without
increasing the structural loads. The
winglet design is done using Catia and
analysis is done using ansys fluent.
A comparison of aerodynamic
characteristics of lift coefficient CL, drag
coefficient CD and lift to drag ratio CL/CD
is to be made for different cant angles at
various angle of attack.
Key Words: Wing, Winglet, Vortices, Cant
angle, Angle of attack, Lift, Drag
 I.

Introduction
A winglet is a device used to improve the
efficiency of aircraft by lowering the lift
induced drag caused by wingtipvortices .
It is a vertical or angled extension at the
tips of each wing. Winglets improve
efficiency by diffusing theshed wingtip
vortex, which in turn reduces the drag
due to lift and improves the wing’s lift
over drag ratio Wingletsincrease the
effective aspect ratio of a wing without
adding greatly to the structural stress and
hence necessaryweight of its structure.
Research into winglet technology for
commercial aviation was pioneered by
Richard Whitcomb in the mid 1970’s.
Small and nearly vertical fins were
installed on a KC-135A and flights were
tested in 1979 and 1980[2] & . Whitcomb,
& revealed that in full size aircraft,
winglets can provide improvements in
efficiency of more than 7%. For airlines,
thistranslates into millions of dollars in
fuel costs. Winglets are being
incorporated into most new transport
aircraft,including business jets, the
Boeing 747- 400, airliners, and military
transport .The wingtip sail was the first
industry application winglet studied by
the Pennsylvania State University (PSU) .
In general any wingtips that do not end
the wing simply horizontally are
considered as some kind of a winglet.
Basically five types of winglets exists,
 Blended Winglets
 Wingtip Fences
 Raked Wingtips
 Spiroid Winglet
 Wing-grid as wing tip
BLENDED WINGLETS (The Real
Winglets):
A blended winglet as shown in Figure 1 is
attached to the wing with smooth curve
instead of a sharp angle and is intended
to reduce interference drag at the
wing/winglet junction. A sharp interior
angle in this region can interact with the
boundary layer flow causing a drag
inducing vortex, negating some of the
benefit of the winglet. The blended
winglet is used on business jets and
sailplanes, where individual buyer
preference is an important marketing
aspect
Blended Winglet Examples

Wingtip fences:
These are a special variant of winglets

that extend

both upward and downward from the tip

of the wing as shown in Figure. Preferred
by European plane-maker Airbus, it is
featured on their full product range
(except the A330/340 family and the
future
 Raked Wingtips:
The raked tip is attached with the main
wingtip with higher angle of sweep than
the main wing. Boeing
777 long-range jets have been designed
with raked wingtip, as shown in Figure3.

Figure:Raked Wingtips on Boeing 777

Long-Range Jets [7]
Spiroid Winglet
One end of the spiroid tip is attached to
the forward part of the wing tip and
continues to form a spiral loop which ends
at the aft portion of the wing tip, as
shown in Figure. Hence it looks oval
shaped when viewed from front. Spiroid
tipped wing was created to reduce the
induced drag and also to reduce the noise
effects associated with the tip vortices.

Figure4:Spiroid Tipped Wing

Wing-grid as wing tip
Wing grid geometry is defined by two or
more wing like surfaces running parallel
to each other from the end of wing
section which forms the grid, as shown in
Figure5.
:Wing Grids as Wing End Section
 LITERATURE REVIEW
• Mervin R Barber and David Selagan have evaluated
the benefits that could be achieved from the
application of winglet to KC-135 aircraft and
compared the results obtained from analytical
analysis, wind tunnel test and flight test. They found
that introducing winglet can reduce drag, increase
lift and improved fuel efficiency significantly. These
results gave a hope to conduct further studies on
the topic.
• Gautham Narayan and Bibin John have analysed the
performance of different types of winglets, namely,
baseline, blended and BMAX winglet. They found that
winglets are more effective at lower aspect ratio and
provide highest improvement in aerodynamic
efficiency at moderate aspect ratio of 10.

• John E. Yates and Coleman have derived the

equations to find the drag and lift from the
fundamental conservation laws. They found that all
drag forces can be ultimately realizes as an entropy
rise or total head loss in the far wake. It is
proportional to the volume integral of the squared
vorticity. Drag can be reduced by reducing the wake.

• [Link] and [Link] in their study,

found that the wing design procedure begins with the
aerofoil selection. The aerofoil is the “heart” of the
aircraft, producing the appropriate amount of lift. The
aerofoil has to be highly efficient in the Low Reynolds
regime. In this sense, the primary selection criterion
was the ability of the aerofoil to generate as high lift
as possible while keeping drag to minimum levels.
• Chakravarthy et al conducted numerical
investigation of winglet angles influence on vortex
shedding. The winglets with different angles is
studied against angle of attack and drag coefficient
during take-off. The best winglet model reduces drag
coefficient and wingtip vortices.

• Ismat Ara et al, in this paper they studied the

performance of winglets on tapered wing. They
analysed the blended and double blended type
winglets using wind tunnel. Blended wing was found
to have high lift to drag ratio than other types. This
result justifies the selection of blended winglet for our
analysis.
• Hesham S M et al said that the first step in
performing a CFD simulation should be to investigate
the effect of the mesh size on the solution results.
Generally, a numerical solution becomes more
accurate as more cells are used, but using additional
cells also increases the required computer memory
and computational time. The grid with the smallest
number of cells displaying an independent solution
should be used for the calculations.

PROCESS METHODOLOGY

Modelling
Design process of the aircraft wing with and without
winglets have been carried out using CATIA V5 with
the following specifications as mentioned below in the
table 1 & 2
Table -1: Specification of the Wing

No Description Dimension
1 Airfoil Type NACA 4412
2 Wing Type Swept Back
 3 Sweep Angle 19.03°
4 Wing Span 22 cm
5 Taper Ratio 0.27
6 Aspect Ratio 3.7
7 Wing Area 130.8 cm2
8 Maximum Chord 9.4 cm
9 Minimum Chord 2.5cm

Fig -2: NACA 4412 airfoil

Table -2: Specification of the winglets

No Description Dimension
1 Winglet Type Blended Winglet
2 Winglet Span 2 cm
3 Winglet Area 5 cm2
4 Winglet Sweep Angle from 47.73°
the wing tip
5 Winglet Taper Ratio 0.12
6 Maximum Chord 2.5 cm
The modelling
7 procedure
Minimum Chord begins with
0.3 cmselection of airfoil. The airfoil

is the “heart” of the aircraft, producing the appropriate amount of

lift. Here we use NACA 4412 airfoil, and data file was created with
the airfoil points. The airfoil data was taken from the website
[Link]. When the model of the wing was finished, it was
saved as“. step” format file.
Model of winglets.
I. Validation Procedures
A similar Numerical Model Rectangular wing withwinglet at
a Cant angle 0° is illustrated in Figure6. Wing and winglet cross
sections are NACA653218airfoil section. A similar Numerical
Model of the same previously-mentioned grid size and type was
developed, for verifying the numerical model with the literature
experiment and numerical model. Measurements were used to
verify the work made by [12]. The tests are performed on a
rectangular wing a chord length of 121mm and a semi-span of
330mm and winglet dimension is a Cant angle 0°, the winglet a
Tip chord of 60.5 mm and a length of 55.1 mm.

Figure 6: Rectangular Wing With Winglet at Cant Angle 0° And

NACA653218 Airfoil Section
The boundary condition is the same as in rectangular wing.
The Reynolds number (Re=2. 89x105) as shown in Figure7, from
literature review, experimental data from [12], in order to
validate the present simulation. The free stream temperature is
288.2 K, which is the same as the environmental temperature. The
density of the air at the given temperature is ρ=1.225kg/m 3, the
pressure is 101325 Pa and the viscosity is μ=1.7894×10-5 kg/m s.
A segregated, implicit solver is utilized (ANSYS FLUENT®
processor) Calculations are done for angles of attack ranging from
0° to 12°. The wing profile, boundary conditions and meshes are
all created in GAMBIT® 2.3.16 as a pre-processor.
 Figure 7: Numerical Model of NACA653218 Rectangular Wing [12].
The volume must be dense enough and computed fields must be
large enough to satisfy far field boundary conditions. 3D unstructured
tetrahedral mesh is used for complex shape of winglet,as shown in Figure
8.

Figure 8: Front View Computed Flow Field for Rectangular Wing With
NACA653218 Airfoil Section.

3.2 Grid dependency check

The first step in performing a CFD simulation should be to investigate the
effect of the mesh size on the solution results. Generally, a numerical solution
becomes more accurate as more cells are used, but using additional cells also
increases the required computer memory and computational time. To examine the
independency of the results to cell number, fivedifferent mesh sizeswere generated.
The results of these five meshes are shown in table 1, Lift coefficientat different
number of grid cellsfor an angle of attack (0°) are indicated.
Table1: Comparison of Five Kinds of Meshing With Different Number of Cells
Cell 43444 85516 146286 2173368 4703836
 number 1 0 1
𝐂𝐋 0.1079 0.1084 0.1085 0.1087 0.1088
In order to save time when running the computations, the grid with the smallest
number of cells displaying an independent solution should be used for the calculations.
This is seen to be the case for a grid with around 2250000 [Link] Rectangular wing
with NACA653218airfoil section model was used to verify the work done by [12] and
[13]. Compare the results of the numerical model by Spalart-Allmaras model to those of
the experimental and numerical models measurements. The results show good
agreement of lift coefficient with the corresponding values in the experimental and
numerical
Effect Ofblended Wingleton Aircraft Wing
This paper shows the difference between wing without winglet and with
Blended [Link] to an airfoil database, scatter diagram of an airfoil used is
a 5-digit NACA series, NACA 65-218airfoil. The airfoil is drawn using Gambit with a
chord length at root 4.17 m and tip 1.755 m. The NACA 65-218 airfoil is extruding by
14.7 m with a taper ratio of 0.4 and, incidence angle at root 3 degree and incidence
angle at tip 0 degree, the Blended winglet is drawn with four angles(θ= 30, 45, 60
and 90 degree), for four cases study. The winglet length is about 17 % of the semi-
span of the wing. The connection between the wing and the winglet is a curved edge
as shown in [Link] wing will run at a Mach number of 0.2 at the sea level. The
pressure and the temperature of air at sea level are 101325 pa and 288.2 K,
respectively.

L=2
m 14.7
m

Figure 10: Wing with Blended Winglets with NACA 65-218Airfoil Section.

Conclusions
From the CFD solution, the figures show that how wingtip vortices
occur and it will increase with increasing angle of attack and the wing
with winglet decrease wingtip vortices at high angle of attack. We
examined the Blended winglet for different angles at (ϴ=30°, 45°,
60°and90°). The winglets improved lift to drag ratio (L/D) by increasing
about 3%to 15% compared with wing without winglet. The optimum
angle was at θ=90° at angle of attack equal 4°. Finally, the wing with
winglet is better than wing without winglet and increase (L/D) ratio.

REFERENCES
1. Faye, R.; Laprete, R.; Winter, M. "Blended Winglets"
Aero, No. 17., Boeing, January 2002.
2. J.D. Anderson, Fundamentals of Aerodynamics, McGraw-
Hill, New York, 2011.
3. D. McLean, Understanding Aerodynamics Arguing from
the Real Physics, Wiley-Blackwell, Chichester, 2013.

4. P. Panagiotou, P. Kaparos, K. Yakinthos, Winglet design

and optimization for a MALE UAV using CFD, Aerospace
Science and Technology, Vol.39, December 2014, pp.
190–205.

5. P. Bourdin, A. Gatto, and M. I. Friswell. "Aircraft Control via

Variable Cant-Angle Winglets", Journal of Aircraft, Vol. 45,
No. 2, 2008,pp. 414-423.

6. M L Kalyana Chakravarthy, U. Sudhakar, Nirmith Kumar

Mishra. Numerical investigation of winglet. angles
influence on vortex shedding ,2015

7. A. abbas , Vicente and Valero Aerodynamic

technologies to improve aircraft performance
,2013.

8. Hesham S. M. Helal, Essam E. Khalil,Osama E. Abdellatif,

Gamal Aerodynamic Analyses of Aircraft-Blended Winglet
Performance by,2016.

9. [Link] and [Link], ATLAS IV wing

aerodynamic design: From conceptual approach to
detailed optimization by,2016.