Wind Tunnel Testing of a 120th Scale Large Civil Tilt-Rotor Model in Airplane and Helicopter Modes

In April 2012 and October 2013, NASA and the U.S. Army jointly conducted a wind tunnel test program examining two notional large tilt rotor designs: NASA's Large Civil Tilt Rotor and the Army's High Efficiency Tilt Rotor. The approximately 6%-scale airframe models (unpowered) were tested without rotors in the U.S. Army 7- by 10-foot wind tunnel at NASA Ames Research Center. Measurements of all six forces and moments acting on the airframe were taken using the wind tunnel scale system. In addition to force and moment measurements, flow visualization using tufts, infrared thermography and oil flow were used to identify flow trajectories, boundary layer transition and areas of flow separation. The purpose of this test was to collect data for the validation of computational fluid dynamics tools, for the development of flight dynamics simulation models, and to validate performance predictions made during conceptual design. This paper focuses on the results for the Large Civil Tilt Rotor model in an airplane mode configuration up to 200 knots of wind tunnel speed. Results are presented with the full airframe model with various wing tip and nacelle configurations, and for a wing-only case also with various wing tip and nacelle configurations. Key results show that the addition of a wing extension outboard of the nacelles produces a significant increase in the lift-to-drag ratio, and interestingly decreases the drag compared to the case where the wing extension is not present. The drag decrease is likely due to complex aerodynamic interactions between the nacelle and wing extension that results in a significant drag benefit.