History Of BWB Aircraft

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A BWB aircraft is a configuration where the wing and fuselage are integrated which essentially results in a large flying wing. BWB aircraft were previously called ‘tailless airplanes’ and ‘Flying-Wing aircraft’. It is an unconventional aircraft design that has continued to attract a great deal of interest due to the promise of great aerodynamic advantages. The conventional wing fuselage configuration has been proven design for many years but, from aerodynamic point of view, is lacking efficiency.
The fuselage provides for a great amount of drag while contributing nothing to the lift of the aircraft. This deficiency has always been balanced by the need for an adequate section to hold the passengers and cargo. The idea for the blended wing body, or flying wing, is to provide a single lifting surface stretching the entire wingspan of the aircraft. There is no tail and no conventional fuselage. Also, the shape of the blended wing body allows for a much smaller wetted area, which in turn increases the lift to drag ratio.

1.2 Historical Background
The transcendence of the aerodynamically efficient BWB design from the standard aircraft design began during the World War II in order to outstrip the already existing designs to prove the superiority and efficiency in military power. The concepts of tailless aircraft and Flying-wing design were remarkably bought to life by the pioneers in USA and Germany.
• Early Flying Wing projects
After the World War I, in 1912 an English Engineer John William Dunne developed the first successful tailless aircraft. Dunne’s based his design on his success with Tailless gliders. His designs were inherently stable in pitch and incorporated wing washout.
Later on in 1931, Lippisch Deltas and Messerschmitt ...

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...ons and CFD results of the BWB configuration are represented, including aerodynamic advantages and aerodynamics features of BWB configuration.
Israel Aircraft Industries pioneers, Peigin and Epstein [16] used NES multiblock code (a Navier-Stokes solver) with the aim of developing an aircraft with minimum drag. The baseline geometry used in this project was same as Qin et al. [15] with lift coefficient of 0.41 and Mach Number 0.85. The resulted design eliminated the shock and the initial drag count of 247 dropped to 194.5 counts. Also, the drag divergence Mach number is increased from 0.855 to 0.87.

Fig. 2-5 Conceptual Flying Wing Design with the A380 Structures (Lee 2003)
In conclusion, the BWB design has offered more attractive features than a conventional design. However, an extensive preliminary design phase is further required to make this concept a reality.

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