An Investigation of the Influence of Body Size and Indentation Asymmetry of the Effectiveness of Body Indentation in Combination with a Cambered Wing

An investigation has been made of a 450 sweptback cambered wing in combination with an unindented body and a body symmetrically indented with respect to its axes designed for a Mach number of 1.2. The ratio of body frontal area to wing planform area was 0.08 for these wing-body combinations. In order to determine the influence of body size on the effectiveness of indentation, the test data have been compared with previously obtained data for similar configurations having a ratio of body frontal area to wing planform area of 0.04. Also, in order to investigate the relative effectiveness of indentation asymmetry, a specially indented body designed to account for the wing camber and also designed for a Mach number of 1.2 has been included in these tests. The investigation was conducted in the Langley 8-Foot Tunnels Branch at Mach numbers from 0.80 to 1.43 and a Reynolds number of approximately 1.85 x 10(exp 6), based on a mean aerodynamic chord length of 5.955 inches. The data indicate that the configurations with larger ratio of body frontal area to wing planform area had smaller reductions in zero-lift wave drag associated with body indentation than the configurations with smaller ratio of body frontal area to wing planform area. The 0.08-area-ratio configurations also had correspondingly smaller increases in the values of maximum lift-drag ratio than the 0.04-area-ratio configurations. The consideration of wing camber in the body indentation design resulted in a 35.5-percent reduction in zero-lift wave drag, compared with a 21.5-percent reduction associated with the symmetrical indentation, but had a negligible effect on the values of maximum lift-drag ratio.