Autodidact
Well-Known Member
I found a couple of papers that seem (to me) to give a pretty good "picture in the mind" explanation of why highly tapered wings have tip stall problems. From what I can discern (caveat), it appears that, to put it simply, the area of a highly tapered wing toward the tip becomes progressively "too small" to carry its fair share of the spanwise lift requirement even with the effects of outward boundary layer flow effectively decreasing (edit: wrong, see Norman's post) the angle of attack, tip vortices, and washout. No doubt it's more complex but this seems to be the basic gist.
The MIT paper also suggests that although Reynolds numbers are not the cause of this phenomenon, they do exacerbate it and I wonder if that is why the tip stall problem is more acute for smaller aircraft?
Pic 1 is the MIT paper and pics two and three are also a good (and simple)explanation of the problem as it applies to VERY small aircraft:
The MIT paper also suggests that although Reynolds numbers are not the cause of this phenomenon, they do exacerbate it and I wonder if that is why the tip stall problem is more acute for smaller aircraft?
Pic 1 is the MIT paper and pics two and three are also a good (and simple)explanation of the problem as it applies to VERY small aircraft:
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