Conceptual design of a new two-seater wing-in ground effect craft

Wing-in-Ground (WIG) crafts are a concept with the potential to revolutionize transportation. They leverage the ground effect to achieve high speeds and efficiency, offering advantages over traditional airplanes and ships. However, there are significant design problems that hinder their widespread adoption such as instability when transiting from inside ground effect (IGE) zone to outside ground effect (OGE) zone. This consequence in drastic change in pressure distribution around the lifting surfaces and causes the location of center of pressure (COP) to migrate along the chord. This phenomenon results in flight instability in longitudinal direction and requires fast response from the pilot to control the hoverwing. Hence, the thesis focused on developing a new conceptual design of two-seater wing in ground effect (WIG) craft based on center of pressure migration investigation. The initial task is to conduct Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) simulations on various types of airfoils incorporated with rectangle and inverse delta wing geometries, and UH18-SPW Hoverwing to investigate COP migration behavior based on pressure distribution around lifting surfaces. Then, the next task to develop a new conceptual design of a two-seater WIG craft based on the established design requirements and verifies the aerodynamic performance of UH18-SPW Hoverwing using CFD software by comparing it to the result of UH18-SPW wind tunnel test data produce by Steven Morris, 2008. After that, a design with minimum COP migration was produce as final outcome. Using the data obtained previously the next step is to analyze and compare the performance of the proposed WIG craft design iteration with respect to baseline design references. The result of the analysis is plotted using excel spreadsheet for better visualization. The aerodynamic performance comparison between the new two-seater WIG craft design and the baseline reference design reveals a significant difference. The new design exhibits a 99% reduction in center of pressure migration, suggesting a significant improved in longitudinal stability. However, this comes at the cost of a substantial trade-off. The new design generates a substantial decrease in maximum lift coefficient of 43% than the baseline. Furthermore, the new design experiences a 48.6% decrease in maximum drag coefficient, which translates to lesser fuel consumption and improved overall efficiency. These findings highlight the need to carefully balance stability improvements with the crucial aspects of lift generation and drag reduction in the design process for WIG craft.

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