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Abstract The following test machines had the bigger vertical tail
surfaces and the engines of the B-50. The
The present work deals with technical issues Stratofreighter maximum speed was reported to be 603
concerning fuselage design. For this purpose, early km/h. Faced with urgent demand for a long-range civil
airplane designs have been used as illustrations, in transport, Boeing proposed a civil version of the
order to show more clearly the thoughts of designers, Stratofreighter, called Boeing 377 Stratocruiser. Boeing
their innovative concepts and pioneering. The built 56 Stratocruisers between 1947 and 1950. During
importance of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) the early 1960s, Aero Space Lines ballooned the
for an efficient fuselage design is addressed. Some Stratocruiser´s fuselage into a whale-like shape to carry
practical applications are shown, which were performed spacecraft sections. Nine of the variants were
with the CFD++ and FLUENT codes. A study of the assembled; some of them called “Superguppies”.
importance of the proper location of an ice probe at the Although only a small number was delivered to airlines,
forward fuselage was also performed and the results are the Boeing B-377 aircraft can be considered a
discussed. successful redesign of the B-29 bomber. This was
possible because the B-29 Superfortress had a
Introduction maximum speed of 576 km/h, which was very similar
to that of the B-377 one. However, some problems
In order to keep manufacturing costs as low as possible,
could occur if the flight envelope of the new
aircraft manufacturers adopted designs that utilize parts
configuration is quite different to the aircraft upon it
of previous configurations in the past. A good example
was based. Boeing kept using older fuselage shapes in
of this approach is the Boeing 377 Stratoliner, which
newer designs as in case of the Boeing 737 airliner,
was derived fromthe Boeing B-29 Superfortress, the
whose fuselage came from that of Boeing 707. In the
famous WWII bomber. Developed during the World
same fashion, the maritime reconnaissance Nimrod
War II the Boeing Stratofreighter (C-97) was based on
aircraft was derived from the Comet airliner, from
the B-29 strategic bomber. The key to the success of the
which it borrowed the fuselage. There are more radical
B-29, the Boeing-developed "117" airfoil, was also the
approaches like the Fairchild-Dornier 328JET twinjet,
trump card of the C-97. Designed entirely by Boeing
which had the same airframe of the 328 turboprop. In
engineers, the wings of the B-29 bomber had lower
recent times, Airbus studied innovative configurations
drag characteristics per pound of lift than any other
for an airliner able to transport 600 passengers (Fig. 1).
airfoil, better stall warning, and had the biggest and
A joined-wing configuration emerged in order to fit the
most efficient flaps then devised. With utilization of the
aircraft into existing airport gates and reduce the
B-29 wing for the C-97, use of the same four engines
induced drag. Joined Airbus A-300 fuselages should
was a natural choice: Wright Cyclones of 2,000
provide enough room to accommodate the envisaged
horsepower each. The Stratofreighter also retained the
passenger capacity and keep the manufacturing costs
landing gear, the lower fuselage and the tail unit of the
low. However, manufacturers have been designing new
B-29. Completely new was the upper fuselage, which
fuselages for their aircraft lately. Due to specific
formed a double-bubble section when mated to the
requirements of each aircraft, modern tooling
lower fuselage. The two first prototypes flew in 1944.
Copyright © 2004 by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Inc. All rights reserved.
machinery, implementation of optimization framework,
and a highly competitive environment, which requires
optimal configurations to fulfill the mission and to be
ahead of the competitors, the old approached almost
disappeared.
Fig. 5 - The Armstrong-Whitworth Argosy (left) and a business jet aircraft (right) employ
vortex generators to fix airflow separation at the upper forward fuselage region. For the specific
case of this Gulfstream aircraft, separation is caused by shock waves forming over the cockpit.
Fig. 6 - Symmetry-plane Mach contours resulting from CFD three-dimensional transonic calculations of the
airflow around a transport aircraft forward fuselage. By properly shaping the fuselage a smooth subcritical
airflow can be achieved. Mach = 0.80, α = 0o.
Fig. 7 - The higher the freestream Mach number, the harder is either the design of a shock-free
fuselage or for reducing the negative effects caused by shock waves. By employing Double-curvature
windshields the maximum local Mach number was reduced 0.24 when it is compared to the
configuration with a single-curvature windshield. (M∞ = 0.85, α = 00).
The flow of low aspect wing-fuselage configuration at a weighting function (WF) that accounts for the mixed
supersonic speeds is similar to the flow around a body flow. WF equal to 1.0 corresponds to uniform sonic
of revolution with the same distribution of cross- flow. The fuselage reshaping according to this
sectional area. According to the area rule, it can be technique is much less severe than the standard area-
assumed that at large distances from the body the ruling method. Thus, the decreased body modification
disturbances in the flow are independent of the should lead to increased efficiency for transonic
arrangement of the components and are only a function aircraft.
of the cross-sectional area distribution. Thus, the drag
of a wing-body configuration can be calculated as if the
configuration were a body of revolution with equivalent
cross sections. The Sears-Haack body has the minimum
possible wave drag for any closed-end body of the same
length and total volume. This leads to the area-rule
principle for minimizing the wave drag. Wave drag at
Mach 1.0 is minimized when the aircraft has a volume
distribution identical to that of a Sears-Haack body.
Drag is reduced when the volume distribution is
changed to resemble more the Sears-Haack’s body,
which has a minimal amount of longitudinal curvature.
The supersonic area-rule was then expanded and Fig. 8 - The extended “cab” smoothes the cross-
validated for the transonic regime. Transonic flow sectional area distribution along the longitudinal
characterizes by mixed regions of subsonic and axis. (Goodmanson and Gratzer, 1973).
supersonic regions. The new transonic area-rule utilizes
A practical example of the area-rule principle is for freestream Mach number of 0.76 and 1.5o angle of
illustrated in Fig. 8, which shows a fuselage attack. The probes were not aligned to the local flow.
modification of the Boeing 747 fuselage by a “cab”
extension. The results of tests (Fig. 9) show that the
divergence Mach number is delayed by smoothing the
area distribution by fairing the fuselage-cab-juncture.
Practical Applications
Fig. 21 – Mach contours for the three configurations calculated with CFD++ (M∞ = 0.76, α = 1.50). The farther
the ice probe is located from the nose, the higher the velocities over the fairing and likely is the occurrence of
flow separation.
General results of an airflow simulation over
the forward fuselage
A low-speed business jet typical configuration was
analyzed at Mach number of 0.65 and zero degree angle
of attack with FLUENT. The configuration was named
JL1. The coupled explicit solver was employed to solve
the airflow over the configuration. The spatial
tetrahedral mesh is comprised of nearly one million
cells (Fig. 22). The Euler flow solution was considered
converged after 1,200 iterations. Fig. 23 shows Mach
contours on the aircraft skin. The maximum local Mach
number is approximately 1.32.