Related papers: Morphing Wing Designs in Commercial Aviation
Aeronautics research has continually sought to achieve the adaptability and morphing performance of avian wings, but in practice, wings of all scales continue to use the same hinged control-surface embodiment. Recent research into compliant…
Morphing aerial vehicles offer enhanced maneuverability and fuel efficiency compared to fixed-wing configurations. However, the trade-off between performance gains and control cost in dynamic, unsteady maneuvers remains under-explored. This…
Avian-informed drones feature morphing wing and tail surfaces, enhancing agility and adaptability in flight. Despite their large potential, realising their full capabilities remains challenging due to the lack of generalized control…
This paper describes an investigation of the possible benefits from wing optimisation in improving the performance of Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs). As an example we study the Avion (3.64 kg mass, 1.60 m span), being designed at the CSIR…
The design and control of winged aircraft and drones is an iterative process aimed at identifying a compromise of mission-specific costs and constraints. When agility is required, shape-shifting (morphing) drones represent an efficient…
The smart morphing wing aircraft (SMWA) is a highly adaptable platform that can be widely used for intelligent warfare due to its real-time variable structure. The flexible conformal array (FCA) is a vital detection component of SMWA, when…
The autonomous operation of flexible-wing aircraft is technically challenging and has never been presented within literature. The lack of an exact modeling framework is due to the complex nonlinear aerodynamic relationships governed by the…
The design and optimisation of aircraft wings are critical tasks in aerospace engineering, requiring a balance between structural integrity, aerostructural performance, and manufacturability. This multifaceted challenge involves the…
We investigate the effect of wing twist flexibility on lift and efficiency of a flapping-wing micro air vehicle capable of liftoff. Wings used previously were chosen to be fully rigid due to modeling and fabrication constraints. However,…
Fluidic locomotion of flapping Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) can be very complex, particularly when the rules from insect flight dynamics (fast flapping dynamics and light wings) are not applicable. In these situations, widely used averaging…
We present a design of a bird-inspired morphing wing aircraft, including bionic research, modeling, simulation and flight experiments. Inspired by birds and activated by a planar linkage, our proposed aircraft has three key states: gliding,…
Accurate and efficient aeroelastic models are critically important for enabling the optimization and control of highly flexible aerospace structures, which are expected to become pervasive in future transportation and energy systems.…
Multi-element wings are popular in the aerospace community due to their high lift performance. Turbulent flow simulations of these configurations require very fine mesh spacings especially near the walls, thereby making use of a boundary…
With more efficient structures, last trends in aeronautics have witnessed an increased flexibility of wings, calling for adequate design and optimization approaches. To correctly model the coupled physics, aerostructural optimization has…
This paper presents a method for incorporating control analysis into design optimization for highly-maneuverable aircraft. By studying reachable sets for aircraft dynamics, we ensure that the optimizer will take the aircraft's controlled…
Birds rely on active high-acceleration morphing and flapping to navigate complex airflows, but they can also maintain stable fixed-wing postures under persistent atmospheric disturbances. Here, we show that avian wings exhibit aerodynamic…
The operation of drones in cluttered environments and over extended areas demands adaptive flight capabilities to meet the opposing aerodynamic requirements of agile and fast cruise flight. High agility and maneuverability are required to…
This study investigates the dynamics of passively morphing foils under accelerated plunging, establishing mechanistic links between transient kinematics, structural compliance, and aerodynamic performance. Two-way coupled simulations are…
Road vehicles contribute to significant levels of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. A potential strategy for improving their aerodynamic efficiency and reducing emissions is through active adaptation of their exterior shapes to the…
The size of a narrow gap traversable by a fixed-wing drone is limited by its wingspan. Inspired by birds, here, we enable the traversal of a gap of sub-wingspan width and height using a morphing-wing drone capable of temporarily sweeping in…