PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - AW609 tiltrotor prototype crashes during test flight
Old 29th Jun 2016, 14:51
  #60 (permalink)  
SansAnhedral
 
Join Date: Nov 2010
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Probably! But its an interesting aside as the AW 609 fin mod truly does look like the BLR fin profile.

The longitudinal strake on a round-ish tailboom causes flow disturbance and boundary layer adjustment that virtualizes an airfoil shape in profile (imagine the tailboom was shaped like a wing with its nose up, quite expensive to manufacture and structurally inefficient). However, if you take a round profile and add a (simple and inexpensive) protrusion to one side near the stagnation point, you get a very similar aerodynamic effect, believe it or not. Think of it as a sort of vortex generator.
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