Multidisciplinary Design and Aerodynamic Assessment of an Agile and Highly Swept Aircraft Configuration

Abstract

The characteristics of highly swept aircraft configurations have been studied in a series of consecutive research projects in DLR for more than 15 years. Currently, the investigations focus on the generic SACCON UCAV configuration, which was specified in a common effort together with the NATO STO/AVT-161 task group. This paper is the first one in a series of articles presenting the SACCON-related research work within DLR. First, the article describes the conceptual design studies being performed for this aircraft configuration. At this point the question is raised, whether the simple aerodynamic methods used within conceptual design can be applied to such type of aircraft configurations with sufficient accuracy. Thus, the second part of this article provides a comparison of the aerodynamic characteristics of the SACCON configuration predicted by low- and high-fidelity aerodynamic methods, as well as some results from wind tunnel experiments.