Slashdot Mirror
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."
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
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)
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.
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.
Ten years ago?
I thought that was 68-69.
Actually (speaking with no knowledge of what I'm talking about) it seems like all you'd need would be front and back hardened rods the length of the wing that were only attached at 2 points - the [electric/mechanical] actuator inside, and a hardpoint on the twisty end...
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!
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....
Mod me down, and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
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
Dont forget active camouflage. And it should be a modified harrier, so it has VTOL.
Sounds like some Air Force boys have been reading cyberpunk novels.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
It sounded to me like it was changes in airflow brought on by a modified control surface. Rather than seeking to deflect enough air directly to alter flight characteristics, the control surfaces would deflect enough air to bend the wing, which would then deflect even more air, and alter flight characteristics more efficiently.
I doubt they will be using the Wright brother method of having the pilot swing back and forth to bend the wings, though it does conjure up amusing images of combat pilots dangling beneath their supersonic planes.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
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.
lol. Yeah, for the swing wing, but what I meant was the automatic adaption of the shape of the wing itself for different speeds.
Here is the only photo I can find. Note the date at the bottom.
Do you know why the road less traveled by is littered with the bones of the unwary?
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.
NZ Electronics Enthusiasts: Check out my Trade Me Listings
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.
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.
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
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.
No. At subsonic speeds, the air flow around an airplane is considered to be incompressable (density is constant). Once you go supersonic, really weird stuff starts happening (like flows accelerating in a diverging nozzle) due to the fact that air then behaves as a compressible flow. Bernoulli's law is still valid at both points, we just don't usually think about the supersonic case.
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.
Why they're modifying the structural integrity field and inertial dampeners, of course.
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
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.
--
Mad science! Robots! Underwear! Cute girls! Full comic online! http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/
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.
Envy my 5 digit Slashdot User ID!
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
everything old is new again?
-
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.