Direct Wing Design and Inverse Airfoil Identification with the Nonlinear Weissinger Method

Abstract

A vortex-lattice method for wing aerodynamics that uses nonlinear airfoil data is presented. Two applications of this procedure are presented: Direct Design of a Flying Wing and Inverse Identification from wind tunnel measurements with low-aspect ratio wings. A Newton method is employed, which not only allows very fast solutions to the nonlinear equations but enables the calculation of static and dynamic stability and control derivatives without further cost.