Design and analysis of the control and stability of a Blended Wing Body aircraft

Future aircraft generations are required to provide higher performance and capacity with minimum cost and environmental impact. This fact calls for the design of revolutionary unconventional configurations, such as the Blended Wing Body (BWB), a tailless aircraft which integrates wing and fuselage into a single lifting surface with efficient and promising results. In this paper, a BWB aircraft baseline was designed and its aerodynamic behaviour and performance were analyzed with a special emphasis on its challenging stability and control features. This problem was approached by enhancing the CEASIOM software for conventional aircraft design by implementing DLR's CPACS, as an unified and more versatile software framework. This improvement enables the design and analysis of future unconventional aircraft configurations. A Vortex Lattice Method (VLM) and a 3D panel method were employed for the aerodynamic analysis and both showed a close agreement. The allocation and sizing of the control surfaces were then iterated to find the optimum winglet size for minimum drag and radar detectability conditions. A global 12% reduction of the control surfaces area was achieved, which implies lower weight and drag. All in all, the satisfactory performance of the BWB concept was confirmed and a new tool for unconventional aircraft design was obtained.