An Overview of the Drag Reduction Technologies and their

Impact on Performance for a civil/military Transport

Aircraft

Fahad Ali1 and Hossein R. Hamdani2

Institute of Space Technology, Islamabad

Flow separation control using different drag reduction techniques plays a pivotal
role in reducing fuel consumption for a transport aircraft. The base drag present at
C-17 aircraft due to the formation of vortices formed by the upsweep at the aft of the
aircraft renders it less economically viable. For this purpose, joint study conducted
by the US Airforce Research laboratory (AFRL), Canadian National Research
council (NRC) and Australian Defense Science and Technology (DST) Group resulted
into the development of three types of technologies which are microvanes, finlets and
fairings. Finlets are fewer in number than microvanes and are installed into the aft of
the fuselage. While fairings are meant to be installed over the pylon and on engine
top. These technologies were tested through wind tunnels from three different
nations. The CFD analysis were also performed where possible which showed good
agreement with the wind tunnel results. The overall drag reduction of about 1.8%-
2% was observed which has a huge act on annual fleet fuel savings for C-17. Flight
performance simulations via a software named Merlin were done by Australia which
showed effectiveness of drag reduction technology on cruise segments and overall
mission of the aircraft in reducing fuel consumption. The results indicated that the
drag reduction technology is more effective in cruise phases of the mission which
constitute the major part in the overall mission profile. The futuristic/ongoing efforts
in this field are through active flow control (AFC) via sweeping jet (SWJ) and
synthetic jet actuators. Both were applied separately on the vertical fin showed
increase in the side force needed to reduce the tail size and to make it effective in the
event of an engine failure. Active closed-loop feedback flow control using which is an
interdisciplinary science combining CFD and control theory is an active area of study
in the area of drag reduction.

I. Introduction

Drag reduction is an essential goal of all aircraft manufacturers to produce economically efficient transport
aircraft. There are various types of drag sources of a transport aircraft at cruise including skin-friction drag
and lift-induced drag which constitute one half and one third of the total drag respectively. Natural laminar
flow (NLF) is a method to achieve a laminar flow region by changing the design shape. The technological
progress in this field offers a variety of techniques including laminar flow technology which uses suction
devices to make the flow laminar increased to a certain extent [1]. Hybrid laminar flow control (HLFC) is
a strategy which combines NLF and some other technique to acquire the same goal. But, there are certain
issues regarding the laminar-turbulent transition which occur as a result of the growth of disturbances. The
key principle is to apply laminar flow technology in such a way to control these disturbances as much as

1
Researcher Associate, Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, IST, Islamabad
2
Professor, Department Aeronautics and Astronautics, IST, Islamabad

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possible. The first application of laminar flow technology is on Boeing-787 nacelles and 787-9 is the first
commercial aircraft to acquire HLFC due to its leading edge sweep as shown in figure 1 respectively.
.

Figure 1 Engine nacelles on Boeing 787-8 benefit from NLF technology

Other techniques to reduce flow separation and reduce drag include active and passive devices. Unlike
passive devices, active devices require energy input for their excitation. Passive techniques include
boundary-layer tripping, vortex generators etc. while active techniques include actuators such as synthetic
jet actuators, plasma actuators and sweeping jet actuators. The area of active flow control (AFC) is an active
area of research till date. All of these techniques or processes share the common goal of reducing
aerodynamic drag which ultimately leads to reduced fuel consumption making the air transport for military
or commercial purpose quite economically viable [2]. The need of saving of fuel can only be considered
severe when we take an example of the uneconomical spending of military aircraft fleets globally. For
example, reducing 1% drag can lead to a decrease in direct operating cost of about 0.2% for a large transport
aircraft. Regarding the concern for efficient, economic aerodynamic designs of aircrafts, the countries using
large transport aircrafts have taken several measures by using kind of drag reduction technology.

II. Background of research in drag reduction technology

With the growing need for large military transport aircraft in the international defense community to
commute personnel and heavy military equipment in the remote battlefields or to undergo rescue operations
in case of a natural disaster, there is a concomitant rise in the fuel prices. To cater for ever-increasing price
hike by economically reducing fuel consumption in aerospace vehicles is of greater concern in the
international aerospace fraternity. For example, US airforce was highly impacted by the usage of jet fuel of
about 2.4 billion gallons during the fiscal year 2012. Out of this, 70% was used by airlifters with C-17
taking a major piece of pie i.e 42% (or about 700 million gallons) [3].
This devastating use of jet fuel has alarmed the airforce of not only United States but also other nations
which are the users of C-17 like Canada and Australia ever since which led them to take necessary steps to
mitigate the burden on their respective economies. This process started when Special Operations command
tried to solve the fuel problem and at the same time improving performance by investigating new low-cost
ways to improve the fuel efficiency of C-130 aircraft. The aeronautical drag reduction has far-reaching
impacts including reduced fuel consumption, improved range and loiter times, greater endurance and higher
operational speeds.
Basically, it was a joint research effort which was conducted under the auspices of Technical cooperation
program to which USA, Canada, New Zealand and Australia are members to explore new ways to reduce

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drag and aircraft’s weight. This led to the collaborative project among USA, Ausralia and Canada to explore
new possibilities and improved technologies to reduce drag. The research aimed at the Lockheed C-130
Hercules and Boeing C-17 Globe master III aircrafts with the focus to relieve their users from tremendous
fuel budget [4].
The reason of enormous drag on C-130 or C-17 aircraft is the extreme upsweep angle of the aft aircraft
which permits the cargo to be loaded easily on the aircraft. The airdropping is also made easy but the
extreme up angle generates large vortices thereby increasing drag as shown in figure 2.

Figure 2 Aft body vortices on C-130

III. Application of Drag Reduction Technology on C-130

A. Finlets
Many efforts have been conducted in the past sixty years to reduce the drag on C-130 aircraft. The initial
studies performed at the two wind tunnels were intended to improve the loiter times which resulted in four
finlets per side with varying heights from eight to eleven inches tall by sixty inches long as shown in figure
3.

Figure 3 Initial finlet installation on C-130

The flight test data showed a 6% reduction in total drag and the pilots reported no handling problems
and this when applied to the whole fleet, would result in saving of four million gallons of fuel. But, there
were problems in airdrop and due to these problems but owing to the overall success of the first attempt,
more research was conducted by vortex control technologies (VCT) which resulted in three small finlets
per side yielding a reduction in drag of about 3.7% saving about 2.9 million gallons of fuel [5].

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B. Microvanes
The parallel program to finlet manufacturing occurring in Lockheed Martin was the development of a
similar device known as microvanes. Unlike finlets, microvanes are smaller in size but more in number.
Due to their large quantity, the idea of wind tunnel testing was rather impractical and the reliance of study
was through CFD only. The initial flight test was conducted on C-130J-30. Microvane is manufactured via
stereolithography-like process with ‘silver tape’ to held it in its place and to prevent the aircraft’s paint.
Aerodynamic drag reduction of about 3% occurred with 2.4 million of gallon fuel saved annually for C-
130 fleet. The results were in good agreement with the CFD predictions. The microvanes generated a few
problems regarding the t airdrop of personnel because static line was being abraded by the lower microvanes
and the jumper failed to separate from the static line. This led to the removal of three vanes following with
the rounded profile on other vanes.

Figure 4 External view of microvanes on USGC-130

IV. Analytic Results of C-17 drag reduction program

A. Finlets
As is obvious from the previous discussion that C-17 is the largest consumer of fuel in the US military
transport. The number of aircrafts in the fleet and the number of flying hours when combined together have
a great impact on fuel economy even when the drag is reduced to a small amount. Initially, the base drag
due to the vortices generated by the upsweep angle of the aft aircraft was reduced by installing strakes
which reduced the total drag by about 2%. To further the research application of drag reduction technologies
of C-130 to C-17 fleet US airforce research laboratory reached out to Canada, Australia and New Zealand
to formulate a collaborative program that aimed at sharing the cost of the development, evaluation, testing
of the finlet technology on C-17 aircraft. For testing purpose, 25 permutations of finlets were analyzed
through CFD to determine the best size, position and number and also to simulate different conditions of
the wind tunnel [6].
The first test took place at the Canadian National Research Council (NRC) 2x3m low-speed closed-loop
wind tunnel located in Ottawa. A clean baseline (with no strakes) have been tested for different alpha and
beta and despite the differences in the flight test and the tunnel conditions, a configuration of eight finlet
per side and four finlet per side yielded a reduction of drag of about 2% respectively with a slight difference
in four finlet configuration.

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 Figure 5 Finlet configuration in NRC 2 by 3 m wind tunnel

Whenever the aft of the aircraft is being changed, the air dropping characteristics must be taken into
consideration. The snagging of the static line with the vanes forward of the strake led to the difficulties for
the jumper which concluded that drag reduction technology cannot be installed at the expense of limiting
the operational capabilities of the aircraft. To counter this problem, the effect of the finlet on the wake was
tested by using twenty-pitot probe traversing wake rake was used as shown in the figure 6.

Figure 6 Finlet configuration in NRC 9 m low-speed tunnel

The goal of the test conducted at NASA Ames Research Centre’s (ARC) Transonic Unitary 11ft wind
tunnel with 2.6% scale model to determine the best in-service and cruise drag reduction for eight and four
finlet configuration respectively [7]. The test results confirmed well the CFD predictions with
approximately 1.8% reductions in the drag. Following the wind tunnel testing, further CFD studies showed
that three Finlets would be as effective as the four Finlet configuration. This was termed “Finlet #1” for the
flight test program Following the wind tunnel testing, further CFD studies showed that three Finlets would
be as effective as the four Finlet configuration. This was termed “Finlet #1” for the flight test program, and
the eight fin configuration was called “Finlet #2”.

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 Figure 7 Detailed finlet configuration in NRC 2by3 wind tunnel
B. Microvanes
A detailed CFD analysis was devoted elapsing hundreds of hours to check the effectiveness of
microvanes. A 3-D surface scan of the aft aircraft was conducted to refine the CAD geometry as it was
investigated that the tail area includes an aperture which was not present in the CAD file. This modification
led to the change in the number of microvanes from five to six to cater for less optimal positions.

Figure 8 CFD analysis of microvanes

The CFD predicted that by employing microvanes, a reduction of about one percent of drag or about 5
million gallons per year would occur.

C. Fairings

Despite of the fact that the C-17 aircraft is the modern airlifter but it developed in the 1980’s when wind
tunnel testing based on flight Reynold’s no and modern CFD tools were not present. Therefore, there are
certain areas which can significantly be improved. Two such areas are over-the top engine pylons and first
generation winglets. After conducting rigorous significant research, it was discovered that blended winglet
design of equivalent span would result in about 1.5% fuel savings. The results also showed that the over
the top pylons can be replaced with modern conventional pylons that intersect near the wing leading edge
to reduce the fuel consumption of about 2.5%.

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 Figure 9 Depiction of high drag winglet and pylons areas on the C-17 and the potential fuel savings

V. Research Methodology

In the drag reduction collaborative program for C-17, Australia contributed by quantifying the fuel
savings after installing the drag reduction technologies by analyzing the mission performance changes. A
pseudo five degrees-of-freedom (5-DOF) [8]flight performance simulation was used to analyze the mission
performance changes resulting from installing drag reducing technologies on the C-17 aircraft. The aircraft
is represented as a point mass with pseudo 5 degrees of freedom with simplified pitch and roll dynamics
included and yaw assumed to be zero. A flight performance model of C-17 aircraft to analyze the mission
performance scenarios which are cruise, mission fuel, mission range and time. For all of these scenarios,
fuel saved and hence improved performance is calculated.

Simulation Tools and Flight performance model

DST has developed an Aircraft Modelling and Integration Environment Library (AMIEL) and an aircraft
performance estimation application (Merlin) to simulate aircraft flight performance and facilitate
operational analyses in support of the Australian Defence Force (ADF). Merlin builds upon AMIEL to
simulate and analyze the mission and maneuver performance of aircraft. The flight performance models
which are used by Merlin and AMIEL are stored in DAVE-ML (Dynamic Aerospace Vehicle Exchange
Markup Language) is a syntax for exchanging flight vehicle dynamic simulation data. For the purpose of
simulating the flight performance of C-17, a model is developed for an aircraft to be used with Merlin. To
be compatible with running pseudo 5-DOF simulations, the aircraft’s developed model gathered data about
its mass, propulsion units, control systems and its aerodynamics. The manufacturer’s provided all of this
data to be used to develop flight performance model which was then validated by the flight performance
manual of C-17. To simulate the pitch and roll dynamics of an aircraft with an appropriate degree of fidelity,
suitable controls data is selected.

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 VI. Results and Discussion

The drag reductions measured during the flight test ranges from 1% to 2%. Therefore, drag percentages in
the form of 1%, 1.5% and 2% at the design point have been considered to study its effect on the cruise
segment and overall flight performance mission.

A. Cruise Segment

The aircraft spends most of its flight time in the cruise segment of the overall mission. The percentage
fuel savings corresponding to different drag reductions i.e. 1%, 1.5% and 2% are listed for five different
gross weights in Table 1 below.
Table 1 Cruise fuel flow reduction vs Gross Weight

As presented in the above table, as the aircraft weight increases, the effectiveness of the drag reduction
decreases means that at the highest weight the drag reduction technology would give minimal amount of
fuel savings.

Table 2 Cruise fuel flow reduction vs pressure altitude

The table 2 lists drag reduction effectiveness on percentage fuel savings corresponding to different
pressure altitudes. The effectiveness of the drag reduction decreases with increasing altitude as the density
decreases at higher altitudes. The coefficient of drag varies with the square of the co-efficient of lift and
this effect is more significant than decrease in drag at higher altitudes which renders drag reduction at higher
altitudes less effective.

B. Overall mission performance analysis

To assess the performance of C-17 for the overall mission after applying drag reduction technologies,
Merlin was used to generate six flight performance simulations. Then, a constant drag reduction is applied
at the flight performance model in flight at high altitude to investigate its fuel saving effects and
performance improvement at cruise phases of the mission. The missions are not operational but give an
overall estimate of the missions which would be encountered by the actual C-17. The missions given in the
table below are analyzed for 1%, 1.5% and 2% reduction in aircraft’s drag corresponding to different cruise
phases.

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 Table 3 Mission percentage fuel saving

As presented in the table above, the drag reductions have a high impact on the fuel savings on the cruise
regions like Cargo Supply, Range and ferry missions of the aircraft. While, the segments with less high
altitude cruise like air drop-low level mission, are less affected by the drag reduction techniques due to the
assumption of the modelling initially assumed.

Table 4 Mission percentage increase in Range

The table above lists percentage mission range increase for different drag reductions. Comparing this
with the %fuel savings indicates that drag reductions are more effective in increasing range than reducing
fuel consumption.

C. Holistic view of the annual fleet fuel savings

The mission types of C-17 flow by each nation is different depending on the support they provide
through it. As a result, a mixture of missions is considered to give an overall view of the fuel usage which
can be independently applied by each nation to assess their fuel annual fleet fuel consumption. Furthermore,
overall drag reduction for two cases in given in the following table.
Table 5 Fleet fuel savings (%)

It shows that for 1-2% drag reduction, the overall fuel savings for C-17 fleet are 0.64% to 1.28%. The upper bound
for the entire flight envelope at 2% increases to about 1.59%.

VII. Possible and on-going future research efforts --- A summary

A. Drag Reduction by Hybrid Laminar Flow Control (HLFC)

One of the on-going efforts in the research community to reduce the aerodynamic drag is to use Hybrid
Laminar Flow Control (HLFC) which is a combination of Natural Laminar Flow (NLF) and a suitable
Laminar Flow Control Technique to achieve laminar flow for a longer extent preventing flow separation.
NLF is the technique to manipulate the surface pressure gradient by changing the shape to increase the
length of the laminar flow. Suction is applied at the first 10% to 20% of the chord to delay the transition of
boundary layer form laminar to turbulent flow [9].

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 Figure 10 Hybrid Laminar Flow concept (Reneaux, 2004)

1. Suppression of Boundary Layer Transition Mechanisms

HLFC can be applied to the wing, tail, engine nacelles and vertical stabilizer of a jet transport or a
military cargo aircraft. The three-dimensional flow over the wing is complex and mainly influenced by the
leading edge sweep. For the engine nacelle, there is no sweep so transitioning mechanisms which occur due
to sweep are not present. Basically, four types of instabilities or transitioning mechanisms can occur due to
complex 3-D flow on the wing or empennage section which is as under:
As the Reynold’s number is exceeded, the Tollmien-Schlichting waves will be amplified as they travel
downstream resulting in the instability of the flow. This can be catered via applying suction, wall cooling
in air, wall heating in water and a strong pressure gradient to stabilize the boundary layer.

There is another phenomenon known as

“attachment line contamination” in which the
fuselage boundary layer tends to propagate from
the wing-root junction along the attachment line
and contaminate the boundary layer into the
swept wing. One way to prevent is to use a ‘gaster
bump’, which acts as a boundary layer diverter
Figure 11 Flow instabilities preventing the fuselage from boundar layer
transition.

type, is called Gortler instability. There are

regions of concave surfaces in some supercritical
airfoils and it is obvious to design away from
gortler.

When the spanwise flow arises on the wing, it

results into cross-flow instability which is a major
Figure 12 Schematic of a Gaster Bump
factor of boundary layer transition at high
subsonic transport aircrafts. This effect is
When applied to boundary layer in open predominant at 5%-10% of the chord where the
systems, a shear layer over a concave surface effects of the spanwise flow are most significant.
exhibits centrifugal instability of the Rayleigh

B. Active Flow Control via modern Fluidic Actuators

Active flow control is the process of manipulating the flow with an external source that require energy
excitation to interact with the oncoming flow. Many types of devices are used for this purpose but the most

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common are the actuators. Amongst them the modern actuators bearing the ongoing research and paving
way for adequate possibilities to be enabled practically in the future are the sweeping jet actuators and
synthetic jet actuators. Actuators are usually classified depending on their function i.e. fluidic actuators
inject or suck fluid while zero-net mass-flux or ZNMF actuators (Glezer & Amitay 2002) work on the
principle of ingesting and expelling fluid through an orifice, with no external mass, in an alternating manner.
The selection of the above mentioned actuators is based on the fact that the research in the recent years in
the areas of active flow control and aerodynamic drag reduction is highly impacted by these actuators. Now,
we will consider each type and investigate their research application in different cases.

1. Sweeping Jet Actuators

A schematic of sweeping jet actuators is shown in the figure below. It can be used to describe the
working principle of SWJ actuators. When the fluid passes through the main channel as shown in figure, it
attaches to a coanda surface due to coanda effect [10]. Due to the development of backflow in the feedback
loop, the jet flow is forced to detach from the surface and attach to the opposite coanda surface. After the
attachment to another coanda surface, feedback flow again comes into play and forces the jet to switch back
to its initial state. This cycle repeats itself to produce an oscillating jet.

One such example is the enhancing of the vertical

tail via SWJ actuators to delay the flow separation
on the highly deflected rudder and increase the
side force it generates. This provides a greater
control authority in the event of an engine failure
during take-off and landing while still operating
normally in the entire flight envelope. This
innovative research effort was sponsored by
Figure 13 Schematic of Sweeping Jet (SWJ) NASA to reduce the size (wetted area) of the
actuator vertical tail to reduce drag and eventually
reducing fuel consumption and greenhouse gas
emissions (nitrogen oxide) [10].

Figure 14 Essential Trim settings of an airplane in

engine failure

Figure 15 SWJ arrangement on 757 vertical fin

Taking into account the crosswind conditions, the vertical tail must be large enough to neutralize the
asymmetric power condition and the drag of the windmilling fan of the failed engine while maintain
directional control. Taking this fact into consideration, the aircraft’s weight and drag increases thereby
increasing fuel consumption [11]. To counter, a system integration study was done by NASA and the flight

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test was performed by the specially outfitted Boeing 757 called the ecoDemonstrator. [12] Thirty-one
sweeping jet actuators were attached on the starboard side of the vertical tail, where the nozzles were
pointed downstream aligned to the rudder hinge line. An external view of the AFC configuration is shown
in the figure. The results of relative increments in rudder effectiveness i.e. enhanced side force at various
rudder deflections as a function of sideslip angle at 100% mass-flow is shown in the figure below.

The above figure indicates a sizeable benefit

in AFC rudder effectiveness. The flight test
results obtained within the testing envelope of
757 ecoDemonstartor renders a 6% improvement
near +5° sideslip at 30° rudder deflection If β is
fixed, AFC impact on rudder efficacy increases
as rudder deflection increases towards 30° [12].
As expected, the influence of AFC adequately
increases as β approaches zero and negative side
slip angles. It was estimated that for 30 degree
rudder deflection, a side force increase of 13% to
Figure 16 Predicted 757 ecoDemonstrator 16% was required for critical sideslip range
percentage increase in rudder effectiveness due to between β = 0° and -7.5° which could enable an
AFC based on approximately 12% reduction in area for the
vertical tail.

2. Synthetic Jet Actuators

Figure 17 Schematic of zero-net mass-flux (ZNMF) or synthetic jet actuators

In the above figure, schematic diagram of a synthetic jet actuator is shown in figure. It consists of an
electrically oscillated membrane located at the bottom of the small cavity having a slot/orifice in the face
opposite to the membrane. The expulsion of fluid occurs, during one cycle, by moving the membrane
upwards. A vortex ring is emitted due to flow separation at the orifice [13]. Under the action of own
momentum, the vortex ring then moves downward and when the membrane moves downward, air is
captured into the cavity. The entrainment of fluid into the cavity does not influence the vortex ring which
is, ideally, at a certain distance from it. Therefore, there is zero-net mass-flux into or out of the cavity for a
single oscillation.

For similar purposes which were achieved through SWJ, synthetic jet actuators can also be used for the
performance enhancement of the vertical tail or fin. The experiments conducted at the open-return wind
tunnel with a test-section of 0.8 by 0.8 m at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and maximum speed of

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approximately 50 m/s. The 1/25 th scale model of Boeing 767 was developed using the publicly available
dimensions. All of the experiments conducted at free-stream velocity of 20 m/s and Reynold’s no of about
275,000. It comprises a NACA 0009 vertical tail with a span of 0.39m. There were about eight synthetic
jet actuators being incorporated into the model with orifices approximately upstream of the rudder hinge
line. After giving the synthetic jets a purely sinusoidal input, the goal of this experiment was the
determination of the effect of flow control on the side force and the corresponding reduction in drag. Figures
below show change in side force and percentage increase in side force for different rudder deflections.

Figure 18 The variation of a) 𝑪𝒀 and b) the percentage change of 𝑪𝒀 with rudder deflection

To produce the same velocity at the exit plane, all the synthetic jets are activated at the same frequency.
A notable increase in the side fore occurs for rudder deflections greater than 0.3 and above. In the range
between 0.4 and 0.6 for rudder deflections at Cμ = 0.721%. When the rudder deflection is increased above
0.7, the flow is massively separated over the rudder, and purely sinusoidal actuation is not as effective.
There is only a very small effect at δ ≤0.2because the flow on the rudder is fully attached.

C. Feedback Flow Control

Active closed-loop flow control (AFC) is a mean to significantly supplement the aerodynamic
performance of many systems involving fluid flow. AFC is mainly effective when the fluidic instabilities
try to change the boundary layer from laminar to turbulent. The field [14]of closed-loop flow control is a
multidisciplinary effort to achieve attached flow by combining control science, experimental and
computational fluid dynamics.

Basic Approach
As shown in Figure below, the first part of the flow control approach is the interrogation of the
uncontrolled flowfield to get a basic understanding of the flow physics. The comprehensions from this
examination provide valuable information for many aspects of eventual feedback flow control
implementation such as initial actuator placement and dominant frequencies, etc. [15] Most importantly,
the information collected in this step allows for the definition of the basic flow state, which captures
pertinent characteristics of the flow.

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 Figure 19 Roadmap for the development of closed-loop feedback control

The second step is to execute open loop forcing using this information., Forcing is introduced with
varying input parameters such as importantly amplitude and frequency at this stage. To understand the
transient response of the flowfield to the control inputs and to update the flow state, the results from this
investigation are then scrutinized [15]. The data obtained from these open-loop forcing studies provide
important information to update flow sensor locations, which heuristically are located where the flowfield
changes the most when open-loop control is applied. In addition, it allows for the development of a mapping
between the sensor information.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the Flow Control Research Group headed by Dr. Syed Hossein Raza
Hamdani working at the Institute of Space technology, Islamabad. This paper has been written under the
auspices of the research efforts being done by this group.

VIII. References

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