Wing Section Thickness and Camber Allocation for Conceptual and Preliminary Aircraft Design

Allocating a wing section thickness and camber for a given aircraft wing configuration is an essential task that has significant impacts across several engineering disciplines. This provided the motivation to develop a method to allocate wing section thickness and camber for a desired critical Mach number and required section lift coefficient. Various airfoil families were analyzed using a potential flow code to observe trends in section lift coefficient and critical Mach number. A method to allocate wing section thickness and camber for a given critical Mach number and desired section lift coefficient was developed for each of these families of airfoils. The method was designed to be rapidly repeatable so that it can easily be applied to other airfoil families, particularly non-conventional or custom airfoils.