Hello everyone,
Sorry for not defining my problem more specifically. I am currently a senior in an aviation program not related to engineering. The class that I am currently taking is advanced aerodynamics course and I am required to present on cutting edge aerodynamics of the past, present, or future for narrow body and wide body aircraft. I am supposed to compare wide body vs narrow body aerodynamics. No other instructions were given to me other than stated above. I am supposed to come up with topics to talk about but I am not sure what. I belief my teacher wants me to talk about the fuselage specifically. Why go wider instead of longer? I know that if the narrow body tends to become very long, it may require a long heavy landing gear in order to permit the desired rotation angle on takeoff without scraping the rear end of the fuselage on the runway. This landing gear problem is alleviated by the shorter fuselage offered by the wide body. Are there any other factors that prevent engineers from designing aircraft longer? Maybe limited size of vertical and horizontal stabilizers affecting longitudinal stability?
What about the increase in drag for wide body aircraft vs narrow body? What are engineers doing to reduce this increase in drag on the wide body fuselage? I found tons of books on fluid dynamics but they have a lot of intense math that is difficult to understand. I found a book titled Design of Aircraft by Thomas C. Corke and it gave me good information on aerodynamic considerations when designing a fuselage. For example, effects of fuselage fineness ratio on viscous and wave drag, formulas in estimating drag, and a number of quantitative fuselage shapes.
The reason why I asked for help in this forum is because I thought maybe there would be someone out there that might be able to help me think about ideas of what to include in my 20 minute presentation and what books to look in. Specifically topics that will help me compare wide body vs narrow body aircraft aerodynamics. I picked up Fundamentals of Aerodynamics by John D. Anderson, Jr and I will be looking it over today. I will definitely be picking up books from the other authors that were suggested as well.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.