Abstract
An attempt is made to develop a piezoelectric based adaptive wing concept that can be used in Micro Air Vehicle (MAV) and Unmanned Air Vehicle (UAV) applications. Laminar boundary layer separation is considered to be a significant problem in low Reynolds number vehicles like MAV. Recently, periodic excitation has gained much interest in the control of flow separation through energizing the boundary layer. In the present study, a piezoelectric bimorph actuator has been used to develop a mechanism that will deflect or vibrate a segment of the wing to produce the required thickness variation and achieve flow control. A Finite Element model of the adaptive wing is developed in ANSYS and numerical results are compared with experiments. A five percent increase in the camber has resulted in 4.39 percent additional lift at higher angles of attack.
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