Experimental Investigation of Effect of Corrugations on Delta Wing for Lift Enhancement in Low Reynolds Number Flow

Micro aerial vehicles (MAV) have proved their importance in a variety of tasks including surveillance in military domain. One of the existing challenges in utilizing these MAVs is their low performance in low Reynolds number regime resulting in poor aerodynamic efficiency and low lift. The corrugations present in insect wings result in improved aerodynamic efficiency even under low Reynolds number flow. This study presents the experimental validation of numerical results of design proposed in the literature that used corrugations to improve the aerodynamic performance of delta wing. Herein, two models are examined, i.e., plain delta wing and corrugated delta wing in a low subsonic wind tunnel at a Reynolds number of 10⁵. The results obtained experimentally reveal that the application of corrugations over plain delta wing results in approximately 25% increase in the aerodynamic efficiency that validates the numerical results presented in the literature. The study further validates that by introducing corrugations on a plain delta wing, a definite lift enhancement is achieved with minimum drag penalty.