Control Authority of a Camber Morphing Flying Wing

Abstract

Flying wings achieve their roll, pitch, and yaw controllability exclusively through spanwise variations of lift and drag due to the lack of an empennage. Instead of using conventional control surfaces, which increase the aerodynamic drag due to gaps and discontinuities, a morphing structure can be employed. This work considers a previously developed camber morphing flying wing, which uses 10 electromechanical actuators to achieve spanwise-varying trailing edge deflections, resulting in variations of the lift and drag distributions and generating moments around the roll, pitch, and yaw axes. To investigate the control authority of the aircraft across all flight maneuvers, a series of multi-objective aerostructural optimizations is carried out. The performance for the individual maneuvers, as well as the interaction of simultaneous roll, pitch, and yaw moments and the resulting control authority, is assessed. Because the same actuators are used for all maneuvers, a high degree of interaction has been found between the achieved rolling and yawing moments. By minimizing the additional drag with the morphing actuation, the undesired effect of adverse yaw is minimized. The results describe a possible control strategy for flying wing aircraft with optimal drag performance.