Morphing Aircraft with Compliant Variable Wing Cambers
It is natural to employ morphing wing designs so that the aircraft can be made adaptive to different flight missions and conditions. Traditionally, the discrete control surfaces were used to re-distribute the aerodynamic loads along the wing span during the flight, so as to tailor the aircraft performance. However, the deflection of discrete surfaces, while providing the desired lift control, may increase the aerodynamic drag. An effective alternative has been to introduce conformal wing/airfoil shape changes for the aerodynamic load control. In this research, an aeroelastic formulation has been developed for flexible airfoils with the capability of modeling their arbitrary camber deformations. Such camber deformations has been included in both the structural and aerodynamic equations.
Sponsor: NASA Ames Research Center (ARC)
Publications: (Refer to the publication page for detailed paper links)
- Su, W., “Dynamic Aeroelastic Response of Highly Flexible Aircraft with Wing Camber Deformations,” AIAA-2015-2057, Proceedings of the 56th AIAA/ASCE/AHS/ASC Structures, Structural Dynamics, and Materials Conference (at AIAA SciTech 2015), Kissimmee, FL, Jan. 5–9, 2015.
- Su, W. and King, C. K., “Aeroelasticity of Flexible Airfoils with Arbitrary Camber Deformations,” AIAA-2016-2048, Proceedings of the 57th AIAA/ASCE/AHS/ASC Structures, Structural Dynamics, and Materials Conference (at AIAA SciTech 2016), San Diego, CA, Jan. 4–8, 2016.
- Su, W., “Development of an Aeroelastic Formulation for Deformable Airfoils using Orthogonal Polynomials,” AIAA Journal, submitted.