Energy-based Aeroelastic Analysis and Optimisation of Morphing Wings

Abstract

Morphing aircraft can change their shape radically when confronted with a variety of conflicting flight conditions throughout their mission. For instance the F-14 Tomcat fighter aircraft, known from the movie Top Gun, was able to sweep its wings from a straight wing configuration to a highly swept version. Such concepts, which are basically rigid body morphing concepts, have been developed further into aircraft which are able to have a distribution of morphing deformations over their wing, exhibiting large elastic straining of the skin. Most popular examples are the Lockheed-Martin Folding Wing concept, and the NextGen Aeronautics Batwing concept. A problem that became apparent from the literature is that there exists no dedicated conceptual design tools for morphing wings. The main focus in the literature has been on design and optimisation of predefined morphing mechanisms. Therefore the research presented in this dissertation focuses on the development of a low-fidelity aeroelastic design tool including a particular method of discretising the morphing deformation distribution over the entire wing. A distribution of local wing fold, shear, and twist is considered to create a model which can morph into any arbitrary wing shape. The model has been successfully applied to a design study of a morphing winglet of a regional airliner and a morphing outboard section of a transport aircraft wing.Aerospace Structures and Computational MechanicsAerospace Engineerin