How Does Winglets Affect The Economic And Social Impact Of Winglets?

Winglets are near-vertical extensions of the wing tips used to increase the performance of an aircraft by reducing wingtip vortices and increasing the lift-to-drag ratio. Winglets were first studied by Richard Whitcomb in the late 1970’s to improve upon aircraft efficiency at a time when fuel conservation was necessary to save on costs with the rising fuel prices. Whitcomb found that winglets could offer an improvement in the lift-to-drag ration over planar wingtip extensions at the same level of the root bending moment. His contributions have led to many more studies on winglets over the past few decades. This paper will look at some of these studies on winglets and how winglets relate to performance of aircraft, as well as their economic and social impacts. Winglets have multiple design purposes. They are cambered so that the wingtip vortices rotating from below the wing strike the surface of the
Parameters were measured for a wide range of wing angles of attack and for several winglet angles. It was concluded that winglets can be used effectively at low speeds with improvements in the lift to drag performance up to 15 percent or higher. However, wing taper is critical to winglet performance at general aviation cruise speeds. Wing taper reduces the effectiveness of winglets because of the lower outboard wing loading with taper. Wing taper may also affect the optimum angle of attack for lift to drag improvements. For optimum winglet effectiveness, an untampered airfoil must be used. At low speeds, a symmetric winglet is at least as effective as a supercritical section winglet. So, there is no reason to use the more difficult to construct supercritical shaped winglet. It is found that there is no need to sweep the winglets for effectiveness at theses