A Static Aeroelastic Analysis of an Active Winglet Concept for Aircraft Performances Improvement

Winglets appeared on aircraft few decades ago (Whitcomb in A design approach and selected wind-tunnel results at high subsonic speeds of wing-tip mounted winglet, 1976 [1]). They have demonstrated their efficiency to decrease the induced drag. However, their design is still a trade-off between structural penalties, high-speed and low-speed aerodynamic performances. Therefore, as fixed devices, they are suboptimal in off-design conditions. The active winglet concept studied in this work may cope with this issue and improve performances in a wider range of operational conditions. CFD/CSM computations are performed and show that the flexibility of the wing must be taken into account to evaluate the impact of active winglets. Besides, a far-field drag decomposition tool is used to highlight the effect of the device on drag physical components.