Design concepts of an aircraft wing: composite and morphing airfoil with auxetic structures

Abstract

This paper is categorized into two parts. (1) A frame work to design the aircraft wing structure and (2) analysis of a morphing airfoil with auxetic structure. The developed design frame work in the first part is used to arrive at the sizes of the various components of an aircraft wing structure. The strength based design is adopted, where the design loads are extracted from the aerodynamic loads. The aerodynamic loads acting on a wing structure are converted to equivalent distributed loads, which are further converted point loads to arrive at the shear forces, bending and twisting moments along the wing span. Based on the estimated shear forces, bending and twisting moments, the strength based design is employed to estimate the sizes of various sections of a composite wing structure. A three dimensional numerical model of the composite wing structure has been developed and analyzed for the extreme load conditions. Glass fiber reinforced plastic material is used in the numerical analysis. The estimated natural frequencies are observed to be in the acceptable limits. Furthermore, the discussed design principles in the first part are extended to the design of a morphing airfoil with auxetic structure. The advantages of the morphing airfoil with auxetic structure are (i) larger displacement with limited straining of the components and (ii) unique deformation characteristics, which produce a theoretical in-plane Poisson’s ratio of–1. Aluminum Alloy AL6061-T651 is considered in the design of all the structural elements. The compliance characteristics of the airfoil are investigated through a numerical model. The numerical results are observed to be in close agreement with the experimental results in the literature.