Airfoil thickness effects on morphing wings

Resumo

© 2018, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Inc, AIAA. All rights reserved.The continuous search for aircraft flight performance to obtain lower fuel consumption leads to the optimization of wings shape and structure focused in the longer flight phase of its mission, the cruise phase. However, this leads to a loss of efficiency for other flight phases such as take-off and landing, resulting in the need for high-lift surfaces, that are basically triggered by electro-mechanical or hydro-mechanical actuators, adding a considerable amount of weight, complexity and cost to the design project. New concepts of aircraft have wing solutions that are optimized for every flight phase and, consequently, are capable of adjusting their structures in order to achieve the best performance on each flight situation. One of the main ideas on how to get this result is the implement of morphing wings by using smart actuators. Shape memory alloys are classified as smart materials and they can be used in order to develop light, simple and cheap solutions to obtain controlled modifications on aircraft aerodynamic surfaces. This paper focuses on evaluating the airfoil thickness effects on morphing wings composed by memory alloy actuators capable of camber adjustment. In order to achieve this goal, the morphing NACA 0020 designed for the present project is compared to a morphing NACA 0012 wing prototype. The fact that previously mentioned prototypes have different airfoil thickness promotes the ideal environment to investigate this effect on the performance of morphing wings capable of camber adjustment. In addition, each previously mentioned morphing wing prototype was compared to its traditional flap configuration to investigate the aerodynamic pros and cons related to this morphing mechanism. The comparison shows that despite the morphing wing as studied resulting in a lower performance, it’s design simplicity and weight reduction brings advantages to the whole aircraft in certain conditions.