METHOD FOR PRELIMINARY STABILITY ANALYSIS OF PRANDTLPLANE AIRCRAFT IN SUBSONIC CONDITIONS

The paper presents a method for the preliminary stability analysis of box-wing aircraft, called PrandtlPlane, proposed as a more efficient alternative to present commercial aircraft within the project “PARSIFAL” (Prandtlplane ARchitecture for the Sustainable Improvement of Future AirpLanes), funded by European Union under the Horizon2020 Program. The presented method is derived from the well-known models proposed by Jan Roskam for conventional aircraft and focuses on the evaluation of  and  derivatives responsible for aircraft stability, with the aim of defining a preliminary design tool, useful to support the Vortex-Lattice Methods, commonly used for preliminary simulations and optimizations of PrandtlPlane aircraft. Results obtained from both the vortex-lattice and the “Roskam-like” methods are compared for a reference PrandtlPlane configuration and a sensitivity analysis is performed on different configurations generated by varying a subset of design parameters Result of such comparison are discussed, analysing the accuracy of “Roskam-like” method and identifying the limitations, as well as the possible improvements.