A novel method for maximum lift prediction in high-lift con gurations

Many decisions in the preliminary design steps of an aircraft are very hard to take, due to a lot of unknown variables at this stage. These early decisions can be made more reliable by testing dierent congurations by numerical methods, repetitively. Therefore, it is very important to have a rapid, reliable and particularly easy to implement numerical tool. One of the most important steps in aerodynamic conguration development is the design and sizing of high lift devices. The main criterion for this design is the lift increment that a particular conguration can produce. Therefore, it is very important to adequately estimate the maximum lift coecient for a apped wing at highly de ected ap congurations. This paper tries to introduce a novel numerical-empirical method for estimation of the lift generation capability of a specic high lift device conguration. However, drag production estimation is not in the scope of this paper. In this method, the linear portion of the lift curve is derived numerically, while the curved near stall region is estimated through empirical methods. The results are compared with some experimental data to show the method validity.