Engineering Commons^™

Comparison Of Induced And Parasitic Drag On Wings With Minimum Induced Drag, Sarah A. Abdel-Motaleb

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

Minimizing the induced drag for steady level flight is a variational problem that requires solving for the optimum lift distribution given a set of design constraints. From lifting-line theory, minimizing the induced drag is, in part, achieved by varying the Fourier coefficients used to describe the section lift. The elliptic lift distribution minimizes the induced drag for a wing with fixed weight and wingspan by setting all but the first coefficient to zero. If wingspan is allowed to vary, a negative third Fourier coefficient is utilized to reach an optimum lift distribution that further reduces the induced drag for stress-limited …