Design of an Infinite Swept Wing Glove for an In-Flight DRE Experiment

The Subsonic Aircraft Roughness Glove Experiment (SARGE) is an in-flight experiment designed to meet NASA Environmentally Responsible Aviation (ERA) project require- ments. The goal of the experiment was to demonstrate the discrete-roughness-element (DRE) technology to delay transition on a swept wing at transport-relevant conditions and subject to crossflow instability. In this paper a redesign of that experiment is described for a different aircraft (G-IIB), meeting the same requirements but using a new methodology that promotes infinite-swept-wing flow on the glove test article. The new glove has the designation TAMU-0706. Increasing the demonstrated capabilities of both natural laminar flow (NLF) and DREs is a large step towards practical laminar flow on transport aircraft. Moreover, the infinite-swept-wing flow methodology not only increases the effective test region of the wing glove but is well adapted for code-validation studies of DRE and other laminar-flow-control (LFC) technologies.

Design of an Infinite Swept Wing Glove for an In-Flight DRE Experiment Conference Paper