Deflection and Stress Analysis of Thin Solid Wings of Arbitrary Plan Form with Particular Reference to Delta Wings

The structural analysis of arbitrary solid cantilever wings by thin-plate theory is reduced to the solution of linear ordinary differential equations by use of the assumption that the chordwise deflections may be expressed in the form of a power series. With the series limited to the first two and the first three terms, the differential equations are solved exactly for several samples of solid delta wings. For cases for which exact solutions to the differential equations cannot be obtained, a numerical procedure is derived. Some experimental data are presented and are found to compare favorably with the present theory.