Static and Dynamic Analysis of an unconventional plane - flying wing

Abstract

The need to investigate the static and dynamic stability for unconventional planes requires development of a code that automates the analysis for the airplane's stability performance. Flying wings are unconventional and challenging to analyze because they lack a tail to control the plane in the longitudinal and the lateral directions. With this motivation, an automated code was designed that was able to accurately predict the stability performance of flying wings. In general most of the stability derivatives that govern the dynamic behavior of an airplane are simplified so they would only include the terms that represent the greatest contribution to its final value. When the greatest contribution to any of the derivatives comes from the tail, and the airplane being analyzed lacks a tail, this represents a problem. This study tries to solve this problem by focusing on decoupling the longitudinal and lateral stability derivatives into its wing and vertical fin contributions.