Winglet effectiveness on low aspect ratio wings at supersonic Mach numbers

A computational study has been conducted on two wings of aspect ratios 1.244 and 1.865, each having 65-deg leading edge sweep angles, to determine the effects of nonplanar winglets at supersonic Mach numbers. A design Mach number of 1.62 was selected. The winglets studied were parametrically varied in alignment, length, sweep, camber, and thickness to determine the effects of winglet geometry on predicted performance. For the computational analysis, an existing Euler code that employed a marching technique was used. The results indicated that the possibility existed for wing-winglet geometries to equal the performance of wing-alone bodies in supersonic flows with both bodies having the same semispan length. The performance parameters of main interest were the lift-to-pressure drag ratio and the pressure drag coefficient as functions of lift coefficient. The lift coefficient range for this study was from -0.20 to 0.70 with emphasis on the range of 0.10 to 0.22.