Calculating WWI aircraft flight performance

[RayJobling]

I'm interested in calculating the flight performance of World War One aircraft.

The aerofoils can give me the coefficient of lift, we have the engine horsepower and the maximum level speeds. Wingloading can generate the stall speeds.

How do I calculate the minimum horse power required for level flight? It seems as though I need an overall aircraft drag figure, so how do I calculate this?

 

[Cyrus]

I'm interested in calculating the flight performance of World War One aircraft.

The aerofoils can give me the coefficient of lift, we have the engine horsepower and the maximum level speeds. Wingloading can generate the stall speeds.

How do I calculate the minimum horse power required for level flight? It seems as though I need an overall aircraft drag figure, so how do I calculate this?

You're going to need to run CFD or obtain experimental data on the drag polar for that I'm afraid.

 

[RayJobling]

Thanks Cyrus,
now what's CFD please?

Ray

 

[Cyrus]

It stands for computational fluid dynamics. You create a model of your problem in a CAD program, and then wrap a mesh around it. The CFD solver then finds the forces and moments. This is by no means a trivial, or cheap, proposition. I think your best bet is to look for this data in old NACA reports.

 

[RayJobling]

Thanks again Cyrus.

I think the pointer towards old NACA reports looks like the better option. To be honest, I hadn't realized that such reports were available, so now the search begins...

Scott Eberhardt did some work on this subject which intrigued me, and released a PDF titled

AIAA Paper 2005-119
43rd AIAA Aerospace Sciences Meeting and Exhibit
10-13 January, 2005, Reno, Nevada

This was fascinating, but lacked the background details to do something useful with it.