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Air Force to Test Aeroelastic Wings
firegate writes "The New Scientist is reporting that the US Air Force is planning to test a variant of the Wing Warping steering system used on the original Wright Brothers plane to steer new supersonic jets. They've invested $41 million in the project so far, and the first test flight will take place next month at NASA's Dryden research center in California."
Right... and didn't i see something about an invisiblity quote a little while back? Maybe they should integrate that in there too...
"Hey brother Christian with your high and mighty errand / your actions speak so loud I can't hear a word you're saying"
The rubber band broke. Ow.
Are they going to be using plywood and fabric too?
We've seen some amazing things due to the innovation of flight. Carbon Fiber, Titanium, Many plastics, even the IC on Silicon. The list could go on for quite a while... if you took NASA and the Air Force out of the material science loop, we'd be living in an entirely different world.
Look for this idea to spawn a host of new things from more complex fly-by-wire systems and innovative materials development and use.
Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it. -Samuel Johns
interesting that they are using technology that was invented in the beginning of the science of flight. kinda makes me wonder what else is coming out of the older technologies
I think I actually read something about this in the Air Force Times (you can pick one up on most military bases). There is usually so much propoganda in there that its nothing but slop but sometimes they have something interesting. This is one of the reasons I got out of the AF, they spend all their money on R&D instead of paying the troops what they deserve to get paid.
There are Airmen (E4 and below) that make almost nothing and are in charge of thousand user networks, or several million LOC systems. It drives me crazy.
I'm a USAF member, and at the office lately we've been tossing around this interesting subject. Honestly, the article presented in the story was pretty lame; here's a few good links we've come up with, if you want to know a bit more about the technology:
NASA Press Release
Air Force Research Laboratory brief
AAW photo collection (NASA)
not to bad
GENERATION O98346: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig and remove a random number from the generation. T
So they are suggesting they are going to be combining this technology with AI or are they developing their own type of AI. THIS is was could lead to Terminator 2 and Matrix-type scenarios. Instead of the wing "morphing" this plane "talks" to other planes and reconfigures its flight path to something a bit more to its liking.
And, hell, throw a couple 18g inversions in there for fun.
This is where it gets interesting...
...tend to break. Many things happen to airplanes when materials fail at high speed. Most all of them are bad. There are already problems with metal fatigue in current passenger airplanes - especially with hidden fractures in carbon fiber composites that are difficult to detect.
So this is what the call "going back to the basics" :)
I'm never going to achieve Nirvana with my Karma
There he goes, with one of his crazy inventions. We've been flying with wings with moving parts ever since I was a wee ant. He should get back in line and prepare for the harvest... er... wait a minute.
[/end attempt at humor]
F-bacher
James Tiberius Kirk: "Spock, the women on your planet are logical. No other planet in the galaxy can make that claim."
Actually wing warping was discontinued due to the fact that as modern airplanes became bigger and heavier rigid Duralium(Aluminium+Copper) and steel was used, which was not very conductive to bending, But I guess with carbon fibre based materials that will change.
Wing warping gives a large degree of control. It is Demostrated very well in the java applet which shows the lift, the forces, the mechanics and the attitude on a model plane(like the one used by wright brothers).My Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
FB : https://www.facebook.com/TanveersPhotography
This is a good sign. We were sorely technologically overmatched in the war in Afghanistan so it is good to see that we will be spending a couple of trillion more dollars improving our weaponry.
Maybe I'm just dense, but I don't think the article specified exactly how the wings would be bent. What will be used to warp the surfaces -- hydraulics? Changes in airflow? Electrical actuators? "Fly by wire" seems a bit too broad :)
I place the blame squarely upon tight pants.
Okay, now that we have the ornithopters, bring on the cute fremchicks!
"Einstein argued that [...] God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software engineer." ~ Brooks
So does this mean the (long dead) Wright Bros get royalties on their wing-warping patent? :-)
I guess it took us a hundred years to figure out they were right all along
We are a little over a year away from the centennial of powered flight. The Wrights made their first successful powered flight on December 17th of 1903. The first run was something around 12 seconds... Later in the day they recorded durations of just short of 1 minute. The wing warping technique was used to control the roll of the airplane. The Europeans later developed the control surfaces known as ailerons to get around patents that the Wright Brothers had made on their wing warping technique. Ailerons eventually became the method of choice for future development for many engineering reasons.
An article on this matter was published and graces the cover of the September 2002 Aerospace America magazine. The plane this system is being tested on if not intended for is the F-18, the writer of the article was J.R. Wilson. Aerospace America page at AIAA.org
The first thing that came to my mind upon reading the post was the Simpsons episode where Lisa's future is foretold. In a sci-fi setting an old Wright Brothers type plane flies by and Lisa's boyfriend says: "I'm so glad they re-evaluated those old designs" anyone remember that one :)
and that means that they can choose to keep it "straight" or more like a traditional wing during straight and level flight as the aircraft accelerates through Mach 1.
They do this simply by controlling the deformation and setting it to the rest state of the surface...since this is a prototype of a very new technology it is fair to assume that aside from deforming the wing for control the actual shape of the wing is very traditional, as are its construction techniques.
This should give a reasonably predictable set of behaviors at transition.
Then again, IANAAE. I should perhaps be heeding my sig.
Don't post innacurate information
If you do, I swear by my pretty floral bonnet I will end you.
....I predict massive carnage at Airshows for the public that will engulf large numbers of innocent onlookers in a fireball of molten metal and plastic! :( um yeah.
Mission adaptable wings are not really that new. I was ooooohing and aaaaaaaaaaahing about ten years ago about the ones they were testing on an F-111.
I think it was on the AFTI F-111...
Do you know why the road less traveled by is littered with the bones of the unwary?
the USAF has modified the wings of an early version of an F-18 fighter. This aircraft was chosen because its wings are more flexible than those of most others./I? F-18 Pilot looks out the cockpit: WTF???? Mayday! My wing's bending all over the place! Control: Um - it's "meant" to be like that! Muffled voice: Hey guys, quick, think of something!)
Will it be jumpable?
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
Dale Brown has just been named head of R&D at Dreamland.
There is a small passage in William Gibson's "Count Zero", where a jump jet is used in a getaway. The smart aircraft changes its shape for optimal flight...
Once this gets into mass production, instead of our enemies looking up and seeing a decked out f-16 with all the trimmings and sophisticated bomb technology, they'll just think it's a overgrown hawk with explosive diarrhea.
How's that for covert!
A Penny for my thoughts? Here's my two cents. I got ripped off!
We won't know if these planes are any good until we can do a double blind study to see if these new planes can kill people more efficiently than the older types of planes. Of course, it's a bit difficult to do a double blind study, because it would require the people killed to actually not know they are dead! Taking care of the researchers is easier; we can hire a bunch of those civil war re-enactors to pretend to be dead (or not!). Well, since it's hard to do a proper double blind study, we'll just have to settle for several single blind studies and work some magic with statistics.
Anyone got a problem with that?
NO SIR!
Good, you are dismissed.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
it was a kiwi who flew first :)
Flex wings
In the Anime OAV Macross Plus, the General Galaxy YF-21 Prototype piloted by Guld Bowman used a variable wing geometry as part of it's design, a feature also incorporated in the production VF-22 Sturmvogel appearing in Macross 7. Of course, the mechanism is different in that (besides being fictional), a shape-memory alloy was used to allow the wing to change shape.
Advances in maneuverability are great, but pilots are, and have been for some time, the limiting factor. The current generation of fighter jets can produce G forces that greatly exceed what even well-trained humans can endure. I think the next major advance will be fully remote fighter jets. If the military had some sense they'd be using cameras on the jets and some kind of vr for the pilots. Voila, war is video games, and all of a sudden I'm an elite fighter pilot!
And my millions of hours logged in Counter-Stike are merely preparation for remote-controlled human-like spec ops. Yeah....
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I just thought I should warn you all, that it's late, I'm tired, and I'm going to sleep. I offer the public service of this informative message, so that you all may be aware & prepared for life to ground to a halt until tomorrow morning, when I, refreshed and in top form once more, shall return. Alert the media of this all-inportant event. Let the women lament.
Hah.. you missed FP AND burned Karma... Leave FPs to the ACs.. they can do it better.
I remember a few years ago seeing in Janes Defense Weekly and other publications about a F-111 testbed vehicle in which the forward edge was replaced with similar techology. While this experiment did not include the entire wing the technologies developed were a definite precursor to the technology presented in the artical. If anyone else remebers this plane please reply, it is possible I have the aircraft type wrong. In an end note I have to say very cool reapplication of sound technology. Who owns the right to the Wright Brothers IP, I see a juicy lawsuit coming. He He He
"What is an autoerotic wing, anyway?"
Learn to spell: nickel, missile, lose, solely, amendment, speech, kernel, probably, ridiculous, deity, hierarchy, versus
I wonderhow long its going to take he USAF to get a patent on the technology?
What's being talked about here is DIRECTED aeroelastic wings, even more elastic than the Boeing jets. Sounds like a neat idea :) sure as hell would result in control surface effectiveness! Not only no control surface gaps, but the whole damn wing's a control surface. In addition, this could also trim the wings to act as flaps, changing wing incidence on the fly.
I can make thousands of dollars worth of ad revenue? Count me in!
What I can tell you though is that the europeans did NOT develop ailerons, that was Richard Pearse in a small farming community of New Zealand, Waitohi.
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Well all the birds and insects will be glad to hear that we superior humans have finally decided to get with the program and utilize controllable surfaces to improve our aerodynamics(think feathers and flexible wings)... now if we could only talk to the hummingbird and bumblebee specialists out there to begin using micro-turbulence effects to our advantage as well... hmmmm, interesting.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
So what you are saying is that superior technology was ditched because of patent/legal issues? Wow. That's a first...
Stop the brainwash
Active aerodynamic surfaces have long seemed to me to be the next big leap in aero technology, nice to see something publicly available -- most of the research into it is too classified to find much out about.
Pictures of the ATFI found at NASA.
NASA was doing this in the 1980's with the AFTI F-111. They called it the MAW (mission adaptive wing). More info here http://www.dfrc.nasa.gov/DTRS/1992/PDF/H-1855.pdf and pics here http://www.dfrc.nasa.gov/gallery/photo/F-111AFTI/H TML/EC86-33385-002.html
It probably cost the Wright brothers about twenty bucks.
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Sorry, I'm only a 1336 h4x0r.
So, we've already got a 'tail-less' airplane, now we want to make one without ailerons or flaps as well? With vectored thrust, isn't a matter of time before we have a wingless, tailless, control-surface-less airplane that can also hover?
Or, is that what they are tesing at area 51? (start humming the X-files theme for more mood)...
And for those of you who are asking about the Wright bros. patent, the government can ignore patent any time they want, just ask the family of Robert Goddard.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
If I were cynical I'd say the defense contractors came up with the fancy new name "aeroelastic" for technology that's been around since the beginning of heavier-than-air flight because you can't go to the Air Force and say, "Please give me a billion dollars to play with wing-warping".
accelerate flow once it has reached mach one in a wind tunnel is a cross secional area increase
So Bernoulli's law is exactly backwards?
Can anyone comment on whether this would reduce or increase the number of moving parts? It seems like this could possible increase reliability as well as the other manifest benefits.
If your bitterest enemies are people who hack the heads off civilians, then I would say you're doing something right.
Every airplane wing is aeroelastic.
Aeroelasticity is the study of fluid-structure interaction. A wing is the interface between fluid and structure. Clever exploits in the structural properties of materials, especially compisites, can make for tailored or active aerolelastic wings, but EVERY WING IS AEROELASTIC.
Somewhat off topic, and I ain't no aero engineer either :-)
..... all of which is a quite severe test :-)
Transonic is the airspeed regime where parts of the airflow are supersonic and parts are subsonic. Subsonic, all airflow is subsonic; supersonic, it is all supersonic. Due to the shapes of wings, canopies, antennas, whatever, the airflow is not smooth, so for instance the airspeed over the top of the wing is faster than below the wing, and you can get supersonic above, subsonic below.
Zipping thru keeps the stresses and turbulence to a minimum. Like going past Mount Rushmore without telling the kids in the backseat, as opposed to parking the car, getting everyone together, payng for tickets, keeping everybody together, waiting in line,
Infuriate left and right
I fly R/C models, and so does the USAF. As a matter of fact many of their prototypes are built as radio controlled models and kinks ironed out (pun intended) before the full-size version is built.
I'm excited about the prospect of seeing a modern style (we already have Kitthawk-style) model designed with wing warping.
Vortan out
Knowledge is like ignorance.. too much can be just as bad as not enough.
The good thing about this is that a lot of useful technologies do spring from military use, however. So eventually if the military blasts out the cash in prototype and production models, this might work its way into improved civilian aircraft.
Jet engines probably wouldn't have come out until much later if not for WW1 and WW2 (notable WW2). I think the internet started in military practive as well (ARPAnet?).
So we have the military to thank for slashdot? hmmm - phorm
FYI, the daily unclassified, non-critical networks that the E-1 through E-4's usually administer have terrible up-time rates and is usually directly attributed to the lack of experience and education. Most of these self-proclaimed IT wizards couldn't manage a Nintendo without their roomate's assistance.
As the network admin for a city govt, who often has to have technical communications with the network admins at the air force base in our city, I can assure you this is 100% correct. The air force guys are absolute rank beginners, but they have an attitude and think they are know-it-alls when in fact they usually know only enough to screw things up. They are only students...green freshman quality students... someday they'll gain the experience to be effective network admins, but IMHO their superiors place them in charge of important systems way too prematurely. My sister works as a civilian accountant/auditor on the base and their office network is down and unusable so often that her office manager can't decide whether to complain about the incompetance, or accuse them of deliberately sabotaging their network so that they cannot perform their auditing jobs (which the AF brass hates the auditors anyway, so there may be a grain of truth to that accusation).
So that on takeoff and climb (and also for extending engine-out glides) the wings can be extended for greater lift, and during level cruise, they can be retracted to reduce drag and allow greater speed.
Actually, the first powered, heavier-than-air flight occured way before 1903. It was achieved by Clément Ader, a wealthy French electrical engineer, who made the first piloted powered takeoff in history, at Armainvilliers, France, in October 1890. He was piloting the Eole, a bat-winged, steam-powered aircraft (with a 10-HP steam engine!). Although he covered a distance of only 165 ft (50 meters), this was enough for the French Army to encourage further experiments and fund Ader's work.
The French Army, not famed for its farsightedness and its vision, threatened to rip apart the fabric of reality by taking a bold, inspired bet on an unproven concept! But read on.
The distance of the first flight wasn't much, but compare to Wright's 12 seconds in the air. Clément Ader's mistake was to take off in the same direction as the wind instead of against it. Nevertheless, Ader persevered.
Ader build several new aircrafts. He claims that he achieved a successful, straight line flight on the Avion III prototype in 1897, a machine still lacking controllability. However, the French Army, its sponsor, wanted a fully maneuverable craft able to transport troops and bombds right away. The Army lost patience and cut Ader's funding. The temporary threat to the natural order of the universe was quashed, and equilibrium was restored. Whew.
You can read more on Clément Ader here. Technical specs of Ader's machines can be found here. Engineering students of Ecole Centrale de Paris constructed a scale model of the Eole that was able to fly.
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The Dryden home page highlights this project. My last contract position was out there. Aside from some management issues (typical incompetent PHBs), there are a lot of smart engineers solving difficult problems there. It has been previously described as a geek playground. I still rank it as the best environment I ever worked in although the culture is slowly changing :(
This is actually follow-on work to a program run out of Wright-Patterson called Advanced Fighter Technology Integration F-111 Mission Adaptive Wing. (Not to be confused with Advanced Fighter Technology Integration F-16, which I worked on...) Here are some photos and a good synopsis of the program. This link covers the final round of flight testing.
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For military planes, 10-20% more bombs.
For civilian planes, refuel 10-20% less often (saving the airline a few bucks in labor - passing the savings directly on to the CEO's offshore account).
So what?
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
It was controlled by an Z-80 microprocessor programmed entirely in assembly language. I left the project before first flight. Hope we didn't kill anybody with a misplaced LDIR
The ultimate will be when they figure out how to get their supersonic jets fast enough that they can get in the first post at Slashdot and actually have it be meaningful.
everything old is new again?
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Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa (and I probably got the latin wrong to) The F-111 bit got me confused. I was mistakenly assuming that the term "mission adaptive wing" in the original post was refering to the variable sweep of the F-111 wing. The "MAW" acronym seemed a credible name for that capability ;) But of course it refers to exactly the kind of wing warping that the article refers to. It looks like the current test may be a little more advanced (as you would expect) probably the same research being taken a bit further.
"New from Tampax: Aeroelastic Wings. Now you can go horseback riding with your legs beh..." Err, okay I grossed myself out.
Now that you mention...
I think that it was kinda like the apple/MS thing: The inferior system was used by many people because it was cheaper. Then, after years, it got to the point where so many people were using the inferior system (and managed to tweak it into doing so many interesting things) that the herd mentality took over -- people started to think that if so many people are using it, it must be the best. After that, they started to forget about the other (possibly inherently better) system.
Now with OS software, the same thing is happening (possibly) again -- but windows is losing market because it is not only more proprietary: It's also inferior
OS Software is like love: The best way to make it grow is to give it away.
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