Design of an Infinite-Swept-Wing Glove for In-Flight Discrete-Roughness-Element Experiment

The Subsonic Aircraft Roughness Glove Experiment is an in-flight experiment designed to meet the NASA Environmentally Responsible Aviation project requirements. The goal of the experiment was to demonstrate the discrete-roughness-element technology to delay transition on a swept wing at transport-relevant conditions and subject to crossflow instability. In this paper, a redesign of that experiment is described for a different aircraft (Gulfstream-IIB), meeting the same requirements, but using a new methodology that promotes infinite-swept-wing flow on the glove test article. The new glove has the designation TAMU-0706. Increasing the demonstrated capabilities of both natural laminar flow and discrete roughness elements is a large step toward practical laminar flow on transport aircraft Moreover, the infinite-swept-wing flow methodology not only increases the effective test region of the wing glove, but is well adapted for code-validation studies of discrete roughness element and other laminar-flow-control technologies.