Estimation of Stability Parameters for Wide Body Aircraft Using Computational Techniques

In this paper, we present the procedure of estimating the aerodynamic coefficients for a commercial aviation aircraft from geometric parameters at low-cruise-flight conditions using US DATCOM (United States Data Compendium) and XFLR software. The purpose of this research was to compare the stability parameters from both pieces of software to determine the efficacy of software solution for a wide-body aircraft at the stated flight conditions. During the initial phase of this project, the geometric parameters were acquired from established literature. In the next phase, stability and control coefficients of the aircraft were estimated using both pieces of software in parallel. Results obtained from both pieces of software were compared for any differences and the both pieces of software were validated with analytical correlations as presented in literature. The plots of various parameters with variations of the angle of attack or control surface deflection have also been obtained and presented. The differences between the software solutions and the analytical results can be associated with approximations of techniques used in software (the vortex lattice method is the background theory used in both DATCOM and XFLR). Additionally, from the results, it can be concluded that XFLR is more reliable than DATCOM for longitudinal, directional, and lateral stability/control coefficients. Analyses of a Boeing 747-200 (a wide-body commercial airliner) in DATCOM and XFLR for complete stability/control analysis including all modes in the longitudinal and lateral directions have been presented. DATCOM already has a sample analysis of a previous version of the Boeing 737; however, the Boeing 747-200 is much larger than the former, and complete analysis was, therefore, felt necessary to study its aerodynamics characteristics. Furthermore, in this research, it was concluded that XFLR is more reliable for various categories of aircraft alike in terms of general stability and control coefficients, and hence many aircraft can be dependably modeled and analyzed in this software.