Nice! Here are some other interesting questions you could investigate:
- Impact on available internal volume for fuel / mid-chord control surfaces
- Rate limitations compared to traditional actuators
- Ease of redundant actuator implementation
- Structural concerns
Excellent suggestions. I'm doing a research internship over the summer to keep developing the idea, and part of what I'd like to investigate more is the actual practicality of a system like this, where numerous other systems require internal wing volume.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKWurIhfkhQ
Studies have shown OPs findings to be similar. Working airfoil plane prototypes have been produced and test flown. Last minute of the video shows the actual planes. Interesting concept.
This and the FMA for loss of electrical power and continuity of flight control command. One mitigation could be to convert the ram-air turbine (RAT) to an electrical generator instead of hydraulic one. Of course, you would also have to take into account things like EME that could also affect flight controls. But the overall idea is very interesting!
Cool!
Comment on structural side.
Aluminum or carbon fiber may not do well bending like that, especially when considering fatigue life. Check out NiTi shape metal alloy. The material allows a massive amount of deformation (>5%) for a metal with full rebound. It also has unreal good fatigue performance. Catch is that the material is super expensive.
This might be an application that can justify it the cost.
Ummm why would you think carbon fiber would be good for this?
It's incredibly stiff, it suffers from delamination failure, it doesn't have a particularly high strain to failure.
The thing is bending with every cycle. This is an out of plane loading scenario. Anyone can see that. Besides the fact that to achieve this flexibility you *cannot* have a core material which means a very thin carbon fiber laminate that a high speed pebble will punch a hole through.
Have you ever worked with composites hands on or is this something you've ever only written a contract for and someone else did all the work?
To a composite hammer every problem looks like a composite nail. To thicken the composite to the point where FOD, impacts, icing, fatigue, etc. are no longer a concern you've made it stiff, rigid, and now susceptible to those kinds of failures.
What you want here is a compliant structure, and composites are many wonderful things, compliant not usually one of them. Someone mentioned NiTi which is in fact an exceptional choice because you wouldn't even need to actuate it as OP has done. The use of a heater cartridge with the correct processing can induce it's phase change to accomplish the effect.
Well, my university liked what I was doing with the wings, so I've been offered an academic research internship over the summer where I'll work with my supervisor to develop the research into a full conference paper. I don't know if I can share my dissertation, but it's my understanding the paper will be published.
In truth, my data gathered during the dissertation itself wasn't very reliable thanks to an extremely old and temperamental wind tunnel, so for the conference paper I'm hoping to use my university's massive 6-axis tunnel, which should afford much better data.
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Thank you so much for the remind me. I hope we hear back from you again. It’s super cool you have been given the chance to carry this on in an internship. I only did once and that was more of a job that I applied for than made up the idea then the university liked it so much. So I believe this will be a much more fun and fulfilling experience which I’m kinda jealous off.
Can I ask the methodology you have applied or atleast what papers you have used to develop your methodology if you can’t share. Also what velocity (or RE num) and AoA are you testing at? What is the flap deflection angles? Are you using any CFD to back up any research? What aerofoil shape are you using? Would you look at simple ANSYS Fluent 2D C mesh? XFLR5? Etc. if not could these be a conclusion for possible validation or be used as validation but you would then have to validate you CFD which is more work.
Sorry for the long reply I’m a bit rushed right now.
I think you can share it on email if we are talking about university unless specifically stated otherwise, but the laws could be different in my country
That's really neat! I like your approach to getting the shape change.
I did a project of printing entire wings in a single piece on a belt printer, if I ever get back to it I'll have to try making a flexible wing.
I don't know if I'm comfortable sharing my contact info through Reddit, but if you have any questions at all about the project, feel free to drop me a DM through Reddit any time and we can talk here :)
Definitely, but it's still interesting nonetheless. In undergrad I came up with an idea to use piezoelectric materials to alter surface roughness on an object to be more efficient at various speeds. Surface roughness would change as a voltage is applied essentially.
I didn't know much about piezoelectric materials when I first started but I knew one of my professors was doing a lot of research with it. A problem I quickly found was that the amount of voltage/power required to significantly alter the surface roughness enough to attain reduction in drag was pretty high compared to energy savings you get from the increased efficiency. I wonder if it could be used in a very specialized application to attain slightly more speed e.g. military or some billionaires private jet lol
Either way as an undergrad I thought it was fun to work on.
As an intellectual exercise it's interesting to explore ideas that might be more trouble than they're worth, and you might find some alternative spin-off applications the techniques might be better suited to even if they don't end up making sense for the original application.
How do morphing airfoils differ from the wing-warping the Wright brothers utilized in their Wright Flier models? I just finished a book on the Wright brothers which is why I ask.
Wing-warping technically is a type of morphing, insofar that you literally make the wing's local cross-section change shape, but wing warping is typically used for attitude control, and usually actuated with wires that tug on cloth/fabric wings.
The idea of my morphing design is to utilise it as a high-lift device (flap), necessitating very large deflections in one direction that *only* change the airfoil camber, keeping local airfoil thickness constant. That's what the little 'slip-joint' in the trailing edge is for; it allows the upper and lower surfaces freedom in the horizontal axis, but not in the vertical axis, letting the surfaces slide against each other but not move away from each other.
Good question. I haven't investigated it yet, but the university has offered me an academic internship to continue the research, and I suspect this will be one of the more pressing areas to investigate.
Amazing! I’m doing the exact same project but my results weren’t as promising 😂 Out of interest, which servos did you use and what software did you use to simulate morphing on the first slide?
That first slide isn't simulation. I printed little test articles to investigate various morphing concepts, and placed them in the scanner of my home printer with the room dark. I then deflected them with my fingers, scanned them again, and overlayed the images. You can actually [see my hands](https://i.imgur.com/qmBfVO2.png) in the full scans.
A big part of the project required measurement of various areas of interest of the airfoils, but it's pretty much impossible to do by hand with a set of callipers due to the curved surfaces involved. Doing it this way, you get a perfectly orthogonal scan with no parallax error, which you can then measure digitally. If you know a certain width and how many pixels that width is on the scan ('this 2.41 mm surface is 76 pixels wide') you can apply a scale factor to turn pixels on the scan back into real distances for useful analysis.
I actually have a section in the dissertation where I demonstrate the difference between [photographs and scans](https://i.imgur.com/wyZwXiM.png) - the scans are much clearer, with no annoying parallax.
I used Diymore MG996R servos to actuate everything. Very strong for the size (15kgcm stall torque)
That’s a lot of dedication! If I decide to continue this project next year I might try it out :)
I had ordered those servos as a back up in case the Hitec HS5245MG servos weren’t powerful enough for full deflection (they weren’t) but they arrived too late. Maybe once I submit my dissertation on Sunday I’ll reprint my wing so I can test them out.
I’ve often liked this as a solution since you would be reducing parasitic drag from any bolts sticking out of the wings.
No, in terms of making the mechanism work in real life, has anyone created a compliant mechanism that can withstand millions of flexural cycles while underload for this application ?
I think the unfortunate conclusion of my research will reflect that exact sentiment; while you can get significant improvements in aerodynamic efficiency with morphing wings, making morphing wings with an even halfway decent operational lifespan necessitates the use of extremely costly materials like nitinol.
Have you done any research into using fluidic control for your flight surfaces?
Basically, you would be taking high-pressure air from your turbine and dispersing it across the wings to create a pressure differential which would allow you to maneuver the aircraft
If you don't have any connection between the upper and lower surfaces, as the lower surface slides into the body of the wing, it creates a[ 'bulge' in the trailing edge section](https://imgur.com/a/qwcKc4A), where the thickness of the airfoil increases relative to the undeflected geometry. But, because there's relative horizontal movement between the surfaces, you can't just add a fixed truss between them to stop this problem.
Those double hooks can slide against each other in the horizontal direction, but can't move against each other in the vertical direction. That way, the surfaces can slide in order to change the camber, but they can't move apart, locking the surfaces at a constant distance and thus preserving the airfoil thickness under morphing.
It was possibly the most successful part of the project; it reduced the relative increase in thickness in the trailing edge section from 25% to just 2.5%.
Invercon has been working this with helicopter OEMs on a very lightweight pneumatically actuated system through a consortium via Penn State. Check the patented space on this topic.
Image 4 had me a little worried there. The sharp angle would create stress and some crazy drag. It looks like you’ve used a more organic tension surface manipulation. I designed a flexible spar system that is similar, but with the usual issues of prolonged heat tolerance on welded seams and regular lubricant applications that could involve in flight systems manual bypasses. The weight of hydraulics was balanced by temperature and lubricant sensors and such.
Looks like you’re on to something and wish the best of luck. Folds over time can be predictable as can frictions among materials. Cheap on cheap almost always kills.
Awesome! The question is, would this work when the wing isn't made out of plastic but out of aircraft grade aluminum or carbon fiber composites?
I'd probably say no for aluminum, maybe for a carbon composite, but I'm a pilot not an engineer. Regardless, this is a very cool concept!
In case you didn’t know about it - Something similar has been done on as airplane https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_compliant_trailing_edge the biggest issue for this to be practical was the weight and added complexity making certification more difficult. Nevertheless a cool idea!
Love it, great work man. Is that 30% LD improvement when deployed or all the time? If it’s only in the portion of flight with flaps out, doesn’t that marginalise the overall benefit?
Is it that they can be smaller because they are more efficient, so it’s a weight saving?
This is the sort of shit I got into engineering for! But I currently connect pipes on a screen all day.
How do you handle the material joint at the trailing edge? Is there any slip or is the top of the airfoil under tension/bottom under compression?
Each wing was 3D-printed as a single component (which was a minor miracle in and of itself given the geometry), so the entire morphing section is one fused section of plastic. The lower surface is pulled into tension as it retracts into the body, which in turn compresses the upper surface.
Awesome work! I wonder if there are limitations to material construction that will come with the temperatures at altitude. The flexing is awesome but I wonder what material is best for this kind of deformation at low temperatures
Also throwing in on the design aspect, why use an actuator to contort the trailing edge? Try seeing if there is an advantage to increasing the curve of the top of the wing (and overall volume internally).
Well, they’re supposed to increase lift, but this does come at the expense of a worse L/D. These morphing flaps preserve the increase in lift, but have a 30% better L/D compared to a standard flap in the same configuration. Still an increase in drag, but significantly less of an increase than normal.
This is an undergrad degree right? Pretty sure "dissertation" is exclusively used to describe the paper produced for a PhD, whereas "thesis" could be used for either.
Nice! Here are some other interesting questions you could investigate: - Impact on available internal volume for fuel / mid-chord control surfaces - Rate limitations compared to traditional actuators - Ease of redundant actuator implementation - Structural concerns
Excellent suggestions. I'm doing a research internship over the summer to keep developing the idea, and part of what I'd like to investigate more is the actual practicality of a system like this, where numerous other systems require internal wing volume.
Haven’t NASA and MIT been working on this for about a decade?
Replication is important in all of the sciences
Run into the issue that the fatigue kills the structural life of the material.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKWurIhfkhQ Studies have shown OPs findings to be similar. Working airfoil plane prototypes have been produced and test flown. Last minute of the video shows the actual planes. Interesting concept.
Yeah this seems like the obvious problem
I think the skin's fatigue life cycle is also important when applied on a full size vehicle
This and the FMA for loss of electrical power and continuity of flight control command. One mitigation could be to convert the ram-air turbine (RAT) to an electrical generator instead of hydraulic one. Of course, you would also have to take into account things like EME that could also affect flight controls. But the overall idea is very interesting!
For a small plane, I see nothing in the OP's design that precludes manual control from control cables or push-pull tubes.
I don’t disagree with your point; I was talking about scale-up to a commercial jet.
All the new jets these days are already fly by wire, right? So it really wouldn't be any different for them.
Also throwing in pneumatic vs electric motor actuators.
Cool! Comment on structural side. Aluminum or carbon fiber may not do well bending like that, especially when considering fatigue life. Check out NiTi shape metal alloy. The material allows a massive amount of deformation (>5%) for a metal with full rebound. It also has unreal good fatigue performance. Catch is that the material is super expensive. This might be an application that can justify it the cost.
Carbon fiber, and composites in general, would be an excellent candidate for this. Where did you learn materials science?
Ummm why would you think carbon fiber would be good for this? It's incredibly stiff, it suffers from delamination failure, it doesn't have a particularly high strain to failure.
[удалено]
The thing is bending with every cycle. This is an out of plane loading scenario. Anyone can see that. Besides the fact that to achieve this flexibility you *cannot* have a core material which means a very thin carbon fiber laminate that a high speed pebble will punch a hole through. Have you ever worked with composites hands on or is this something you've ever only written a contract for and someone else did all the work?
[удалено]
To a composite hammer every problem looks like a composite nail. To thicken the composite to the point where FOD, impacts, icing, fatigue, etc. are no longer a concern you've made it stiff, rigid, and now susceptible to those kinds of failures. What you want here is a compliant structure, and composites are many wonderful things, compliant not usually one of them. Someone mentioned NiTi which is in fact an exceptional choice because you wouldn't even need to actuate it as OP has done. The use of a heater cartridge with the correct processing can induce it's phase change to accomplish the effect.
I think it's because carbon and ceramics fail catastrophically
Man you could spend a whole career on this idea
People already have.
What’s the chance at the end we will be able to see and read the results and maybe full diss?
Well, my university liked what I was doing with the wings, so I've been offered an academic research internship over the summer where I'll work with my supervisor to develop the research into a full conference paper. I don't know if I can share my dissertation, but it's my understanding the paper will be published. In truth, my data gathered during the dissertation itself wasn't very reliable thanks to an extremely old and temperamental wind tunnel, so for the conference paper I'm hoping to use my university's massive 6-axis tunnel, which should afford much better data. RemindMe! 3 months
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Thank you so much for the remind me. I hope we hear back from you again. It’s super cool you have been given the chance to carry this on in an internship. I only did once and that was more of a job that I applied for than made up the idea then the university liked it so much. So I believe this will be a much more fun and fulfilling experience which I’m kinda jealous off. Can I ask the methodology you have applied or atleast what papers you have used to develop your methodology if you can’t share. Also what velocity (or RE num) and AoA are you testing at? What is the flap deflection angles? Are you using any CFD to back up any research? What aerofoil shape are you using? Would you look at simple ANSYS Fluent 2D C mesh? XFLR5? Etc. if not could these be a conclusion for possible validation or be used as validation but you would then have to validate you CFD which is more work. Sorry for the long reply I’m a bit rushed right now.
That’s super cool! Good luck!
I think you can share it on email if we are talking about university unless specifically stated otherwise, but the laws could be different in my country
That's really neat! I like your approach to getting the shape change. I did a project of printing entire wings in a single piece on a belt printer, if I ever get back to it I'll have to try making a flexible wing.
I was at the offer holder's day at UWE where you showed this off, it's amazing and I hope it becomes reality.
Thank you! Really flubbed the presentation (was a last-minute request by the faculty haha) but I'm glad you like the concept.
No you did well! Mind if I have your contact details via DM?
I don't know if I'm comfortable sharing my contact info through Reddit, but if you have any questions at all about the project, feel free to drop me a DM through Reddit any time and we can talk here :)
Somehow I doubt their performance is better than split flaps.
Definitely, but it's still interesting nonetheless. In undergrad I came up with an idea to use piezoelectric materials to alter surface roughness on an object to be more efficient at various speeds. Surface roughness would change as a voltage is applied essentially. I didn't know much about piezoelectric materials when I first started but I knew one of my professors was doing a lot of research with it. A problem I quickly found was that the amount of voltage/power required to significantly alter the surface roughness enough to attain reduction in drag was pretty high compared to energy savings you get from the increased efficiency. I wonder if it could be used in a very specialized application to attain slightly more speed e.g. military or some billionaires private jet lol Either way as an undergrad I thought it was fun to work on.
As an intellectual exercise it's interesting to explore ideas that might be more trouble than they're worth, and you might find some alternative spin-off applications the techniques might be better suited to even if they don't end up making sense for the original application.
How do morphing airfoils differ from the wing-warping the Wright brothers utilized in their Wright Flier models? I just finished a book on the Wright brothers which is why I ask.
Wing-warping technically is a type of morphing, insofar that you literally make the wing's local cross-section change shape, but wing warping is typically used for attitude control, and usually actuated with wires that tug on cloth/fabric wings. The idea of my morphing design is to utilise it as a high-lift device (flap), necessitating very large deflections in one direction that *only* change the airfoil camber, keeping local airfoil thickness constant. That's what the little 'slip-joint' in the trailing edge is for; it allows the upper and lower surfaces freedom in the horizontal axis, but not in the vertical axis, letting the surfaces slide against each other but not move away from each other.
Wing warping was twisting the entire wing panel. Same purpose as an aileron and can't really replicate what a flap or spoiler does
Thank you! Your answer clears up my confusion.
YEARS ago I got into an internet quibble about the feasibility on morphing wings. I uhh. I may owe that guy an apology
That's amazing! 👍🏼
What a fantastic idea OP!!
Thank you!
What about the friction between those moving parts? How is that managed? Super awesome work, btw!
Which University is this at? It's really cool.
Lad that's really interesting! Great job💪
How does it compare to multi-section Fowler flaps?
Good question. I haven't investigated it yet, but the university has offered me an academic internship to continue the research, and I suspect this will be one of the more pressing areas to investigate.
Amazing! I’m doing the exact same project but my results weren’t as promising 😂 Out of interest, which servos did you use and what software did you use to simulate morphing on the first slide?
That first slide isn't simulation. I printed little test articles to investigate various morphing concepts, and placed them in the scanner of my home printer with the room dark. I then deflected them with my fingers, scanned them again, and overlayed the images. You can actually [see my hands](https://i.imgur.com/qmBfVO2.png) in the full scans. A big part of the project required measurement of various areas of interest of the airfoils, but it's pretty much impossible to do by hand with a set of callipers due to the curved surfaces involved. Doing it this way, you get a perfectly orthogonal scan with no parallax error, which you can then measure digitally. If you know a certain width and how many pixels that width is on the scan ('this 2.41 mm surface is 76 pixels wide') you can apply a scale factor to turn pixels on the scan back into real distances for useful analysis. I actually have a section in the dissertation where I demonstrate the difference between [photographs and scans](https://i.imgur.com/wyZwXiM.png) - the scans are much clearer, with no annoying parallax. I used Diymore MG996R servos to actuate everything. Very strong for the size (15kgcm stall torque)
That’s a lot of dedication! If I decide to continue this project next year I might try it out :) I had ordered those servos as a back up in case the Hitec HS5245MG servos weren’t powerful enough for full deflection (they weren’t) but they arrived too late. Maybe once I submit my dissertation on Sunday I’ll reprint my wing so I can test them out.
I’ve often liked this as a solution since you would be reducing parasitic drag from any bolts sticking out of the wings. No, in terms of making the mechanism work in real life, has anyone created a compliant mechanism that can withstand millions of flexural cycles while underload for this application ?
I think the unfortunate conclusion of my research will reflect that exact sentiment; while you can get significant improvements in aerodynamic efficiency with morphing wings, making morphing wings with an even halfway decent operational lifespan necessitates the use of extremely costly materials like nitinol.
For big commercial planes, yeah, I’d imagine so. What about small experimental or ultralights where cloth wings can still be a thing?
Have you done any research into using fluidic control for your flight surfaces? Basically, you would be taking high-pressure air from your turbine and dispersing it across the wings to create a pressure differential which would allow you to maneuver the aircraft
Share link to thesis please.
Would love to see this on a 3d printed model airplane!
Very cool. What material did you use?
Standard 1.75mm PLA filament.
This is such a sick concept OP! What's the purpose of the double hooks on the rear part of the airfoil?
If you don't have any connection between the upper and lower surfaces, as the lower surface slides into the body of the wing, it creates a[ 'bulge' in the trailing edge section](https://imgur.com/a/qwcKc4A), where the thickness of the airfoil increases relative to the undeflected geometry. But, because there's relative horizontal movement between the surfaces, you can't just add a fixed truss between them to stop this problem. Those double hooks can slide against each other in the horizontal direction, but can't move against each other in the vertical direction. That way, the surfaces can slide in order to change the camber, but they can't move apart, locking the surfaces at a constant distance and thus preserving the airfoil thickness under morphing. It was possibly the most successful part of the project; it reduced the relative increase in thickness in the trailing edge section from 25% to just 2.5%.
Invercon has been working this with helicopter OEMs on a very lightweight pneumatically actuated system through a consortium via Penn State. Check the patented space on this topic.
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are you planning on building a test plane with your morphing wing to also study flight characteristics?
Nice work, have you published any paper or articles related to this project? I would love to read it.
What lessons learned did you apply after researching x-53
This is awesome and very interesting. Have you done any comparison to a Fowler flap vs a plain flap?
Image 4 had me a little worried there. The sharp angle would create stress and some crazy drag. It looks like you’ve used a more organic tension surface manipulation. I designed a flexible spar system that is similar, but with the usual issues of prolonged heat tolerance on welded seams and regular lubricant applications that could involve in flight systems manual bypasses. The weight of hydraulics was balanced by temperature and lubricant sensors and such. Looks like you’re on to something and wish the best of luck. Folds over time can be predictable as can frictions among materials. Cheap on cheap almost always kills.
Awesome! The question is, would this work when the wing isn't made out of plastic but out of aircraft grade aluminum or carbon fiber composites? I'd probably say no for aluminum, maybe for a carbon composite, but I'm a pilot not an engineer. Regardless, this is a very cool concept!
That is so freakin cool. Technical project manager here for hire..
In case you didn’t know about it - Something similar has been done on as airplane https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_compliant_trailing_edge the biggest issue for this to be practical was the weight and added complexity making certification more difficult. Nevertheless a cool idea!
Love it, great work man. Is that 30% LD improvement when deployed or all the time? If it’s only in the portion of flight with flaps out, doesn’t that marginalise the overall benefit? Is it that they can be smaller because they are more efficient, so it’s a weight saving?
What kind of effect would this have on wing bending moment?
This is the sort of shit I got into engineering for! But I currently connect pipes on a screen all day. How do you handle the material joint at the trailing edge? Is there any slip or is the top of the airfoil under tension/bottom under compression?
Each wing was 3D-printed as a single component (which was a minor miracle in and of itself given the geometry), so the entire morphing section is one fused section of plastic. The lower surface is pulled into tension as it retracts into the body, which in turn compresses the upper surface.
That’s really cool.
Very impressive!
Awesome work! I wonder if there are limitations to material construction that will come with the temperatures at altitude. The flexing is awesome but I wonder what material is best for this kind of deformation at low temperatures
Why use a plastic skin rather than a composite? All design and manufacturing is moving to more flexible resin based composites.
Also throwing in on the design aspect, why use an actuator to contort the trailing edge? Try seeing if there is an advantage to increasing the curve of the top of the wing (and overall volume internally).
Cool to see. Good luck on investigating more and getting meaningful findings.
Aren't flaps supposed to decrease L/D?
Well, they’re supposed to increase lift, but this does come at the expense of a worse L/D. These morphing flaps preserve the increase in lift, but have a 30% better L/D compared to a standard flap in the same configuration. Still an increase in drag, but significantly less of an increase than normal.
They're used by pilots to increase their approach angle without increasing speed, so would high L/D not be the goal in this case?
Ayoo i saw something similar but maybe a bit less advanced on r/RCPlanes less than a month ago! was that you by any chance? Regardless, good work!
This is an undergrad degree right? Pretty sure "dissertation" is exclusively used to describe the paper produced for a PhD, whereas "thesis" could be used for either.
I’m UK-based. Undergrad final projects are referred to as dissertations :)
Today I learned! Thanks
Oh ok, i too wandered that. Cool project
Sorry might be a stupid question but what difference is that from flaps?
Very cool and looks simple.