Aerospace Engineering Commons^™

A General Approach To Lifting-Line Theory, Applied To Wings With Sweep, Jackson T. Reid

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Lifting-line theory is one simple method of predicting the lift produced by a wing. The traditional implementation of lifting-line theory, developed in 1918, is limited to predicting the lift of traditional straight wings. In this work, lifting-line theory is extended to predict the lift produced by modern swept (or "v-shaped") wings by strategically handling the singularities inherent to the theory. The resulting formulation is shown to be both accurate and computationally inexpensive, when compared to experimental and higher-fidelity computational results, demonstrating the method's usefulness as an aerodynamic design tool. Because of the low computational cost and accuracy of the method …