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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."
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
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 :)
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
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?
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.
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.