Numerical analysis of winglets used for unmanned aerial vehicles

While planes fly in the air, rotating air occurs at the wing tip because of the wingshape. These vortices can cause loss of aerodynamic performance for the aircraft itself and the trailing aircraft coming after it. As it is known that the performance of the aircraft is very much dependent on the shape of the wing. Velocities of air flow under and top of wing are different. Likewise, pressures are different too. From the tip of the wing, air tries to go from under to top. This is the reason that rotating air flows occur. These rotating flows are named as vortices. Winglets are used to prevent the escape of air from below to top of the wing and thus, vortices are prevented to grow. In this study, the aerodynamic forces, velocity and pressure distributions are analyzed for a wing with SD7062 airfoil with the commercial CFD program ANSYS Fluent. Calculations are made for one clean wing and 3 different winglets named End-Plate, Blended and Scimitar which are added on this clean wing. Each model is analyzed for different angle of attack degrees between -5 and 17. After the calculations, it is seen that drag forces decreased, soaring and lift forces are increased for wings with winglets. It means that aerodynamic performances are increased.