Conceptual Design Prediction of the Buffet Envelope of Transport Aircraft

This paper describes a methodology that inexpensively predicts the buffet envelope of new transport airplane wing geometries at the conceptual design stage. The parameters that demonstrate a strong functional sensitivity to buffet onset were identified and their relative effect was quantified. To estimate the buffet envelope of any target aircraft geometry, the method uses fractional change transformations in consort with a generic reference buffet onset curve provided by the authors or the buffet onset of a known seed airplane. The explicit design variables required to perform buffet onset prediction are those describing the wing planform and the wingtip section. The mutually exclusive nature of the method’s analytical construct provides considerable freedom in deciding the scope of freedesign-variable complexity. The method has been shown to be adequately robust and flexible enough to deal with a wide variety of transport airplane designs. For the example transport airplanes considered, irrespective of aircraft morphology and en route flight phase, the relative error in prediction was found to be mostly within 5:0%, with occasional excursions not exceeding a 9:0% bandwidth. The standard error of estimate for the lift coefficient a 1:0 g buffet onset at a given Mach number was calculated to be 0.0262.