Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 July 2016
This paper presents a critical study related to the evaluation and breakdown of total wing drag based on solutions of the Euler equations for subsonic and transonic three-dimensional flows.
This study clearly identifies the false entropy production present in all discretised Euler solutions as the main source of the discrepancies between the drag predictions produced by body-surface pressure integrations and far-field methods. A good understanding of the entropy production mechanisms present in discretised threedimensional Euler solutions has lead to an original procedure for the total drag breakdown and a new method for the evaluation of the induced drag. This new technique is based on body-surface pressure integrations and Oswatitsch’s expression integrated over suitable integration surfaces. In contrast with the various methods for the drag breakdown and the evaluation of the induced drag available in the literature, the proposed technique uses an exact formulation and is simple to implement. Using detailed drag calculations on an elliptic wing (the Xt = 1·0 wing) and the ONERA M6 wing, it has been shown that this new technique is not strongly sensitive to grid refinement and to the level of false entropy production in the calculation domain.