Numerical study of a supercritical airfoil/wing with variable-camber technology

Variable-camber technology is considered an effective way to adaptively improve the aerodynamic performance of aircraft under various flight conditions. This paper studies the aerodynamic characteristics of the trailing-edge variable-camber technology by means of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and a drag decomposition method. Trailing-edge variable-camber technology can be simply realized by the continuous deflection of the flaps and ailerons of a wing. A supercritical airfoil is used to study the two-dimensional effect of variable-camber technology, and a wide-body airplane model is used to validate the three-dimensional improvement in the wing's airfoil made by variable-camber technology. An optimization strategy for airfoil that incorporates variable-camber technology is proposed. The optimization results demonstrate that the proposed method can obtain better results than the traditional segregated shape optimization.