By Christoph Hiemcke, Werner Seibert, S. Shashidhar, and Rajib Chakraborty, Fluent Inc.

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Photo and sketches courtesy of National Air & Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution (SI 2002-16646, SI 2000-4488)

December 17, 1903
Kitty Hawk, North Carolina:

With Orville Wright at the controls, and Wilbur supporting the right wingtip, the 1903 Wright Flyer lifted off its launch rail to become the world’s first powered, controlled, and manned aircraft.

Following years of patient and carefully conceived trials, the Wright Brothers succeeded in pulling together all of the features required for a successful airplane. They tested different kite configurations, invented a wingwarping mechanism to permit banking of their air vehicles, systematically evaluated airfoils mounted in front of the handlebars of a bicycle (they owned a bicycle factory) and later in their own wind tunnel, flight-tested manned gliders, built their own motor, and designed their own propellers.

Their achievement was not widely recognized for some time, mainly because of the secrecy that surrounded it. In the meantime, other manufacturers surpassed their design, especially through Glenn Curtiss’ introduction of the aileron (a hinged flap for lateral roll control) instead of the Wrights’ wing warping mechanism, and through an aft placement of the elevator (an auxiliary airfoil used for pitch control) instead of the Wright Brothers’ upwind placement. Interestingly, the Wrights had initially placed the elevator in front of the pilot to improve the responsiveness of their gliders; later, they kept it in this“canard configuration” to protect the pilot during crashes, and to allow him to observe the elevator during flight. The big problem with the canard was that it made the airplane unstable, making it difficult for the pilot to control the nose-up and nose-down motions.

In addition to their initial historic flight and the first use of canards, the Wright Brothers can be credited with many firsts in aerospace engineering, including the systematic wind tunnel testing of airfoils, the development of a control system for banking airplanes, and the development of an effective theory for airplane propellers.

Contours of pressure on the mid-plane of the Flyer
Postprocessing by Advantage CFD (www.advantage-cfd.co.uk) using EnSight by CEI

December 17, 2003
Kitty Hawk, North Carolina:

One hundred years later, a repeat of the historic first flight is planned using a replica of the Wright Flyer.

Aviation has come a long way in the past one hundred years, and the advances in flight have only heightened the appreciation for the remarkable achievements of the Wright Brothers. To commemorate these achievements, the centennial year has featured a broad range of events and celebrations. Preparations for these festivities began years ago, especially through efforts to construct replicas of the 1903 Wright Flyer. Both wind tunnels and CFD were used during the design of these replicas to improve engineers’ understanding of the performance of the airplane components. One application of CFD to the design of a Wright Flyer replica is the analysis of the performance of the 1903 propellers with FLUENT (see the following story.) An important goal was to fully anticipate the propeller aerodynamics at off-design conditions.

To celebrate the centennial, Fluent engineers created a mesh of the full aircraft, and computed the flow at the historic cruise speed of 30 mph. The model included most of the detailed features of the full Flyer, such as all struts, the motor, and Orville at the controls, but did not account for the deformation and permeability of the muslin fabric covering the wings and control surfaces, or for the bending deformations of the wings. Qualitatively, the computed flow is as expected, although quantitative comparisons with the original Flyer cannot be made due to the geometric details that were omitted.

Some interesting technical data for the 1903 Wright Flyer; notice how close the stall speed is to the cruise speed!

More Information

www.centennialofflight.gov
www.ensight.com/news/wrightbros.html

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