Abstract
Conventional or fixed wings require a certain thickness of skin material selection that guarantees structurally reliable strength under expected aerodynamic loadings. However, skin structures of morphing wings need to be flexible as well as stiff enough to deal with multi-axial structural stresses from changed geometry and the coupled aerodynamic loadings. Many works in the design of skin structures for morphing wings take the approach either of only geometric compliance or a simplified model that does not fully represent 3D real-scale wing models. Thus, the main theme of this study is (1) to numerically identify the multi-axial stress, strain, and deformation of skin in a camber morphing wing aircraft under both structure and aerodynamic loadings, and then (2) to show the effectiveness of a direct approach that uses 3D lattice structures for skin. Various lattice structures and their direct 3D wing models have been numerically analyzed for advanced skin design.
Highlights
Wing morphing is a concept whereby the shape of an aircraft’s wing is altered in a continuous manner to suit the desired flight condition
Many researchers have worked towards the study of using smart materials and their aerodynamic reactions to investigate and realize shape morphing [5,6]
The skin structure is expected to deform in a 1–2 mm out-of-plane direction under maximum aerodynamic loadings
Summary
Wing morphing is a concept whereby the shape of an aircraft’s wing is altered in a continuous manner to suit the desired flight condition. The importance of skin material/structure in morphing wings has been neglected due to its complexity. In the case of morphing wings, newly induced structural stress to the wing but the associated aerodynamic effects caused by shape changes should be considered. In chord extension morphing, the skin around the wing is required to be flexible in the chord direction and to maintain out-of-plane or span directional loadings, which makes compliant skin design challenging
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