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Morphing Plane Wings for Efficient Flights
Roland Piquepaille writes "Airplanes, whether manned or unmanned, need to travel at various speeds. For example, a surveillance plane needs to fly fast to reach its destination point. Then, it needs to reduce its speed to achieve its surveillance mission. But with its fixed wings, it doesn't offer the same level of efficiency during these two phases. That's why Penn State engineers have devised airplane wings that change shape like a bird and have scales like a fish. Right now, the team has only built a tabletop model. So it will be a long time before you catch a plane and watch the wings disappear by looking through the window. This overview contains more details and references, including a couple of images describing the work done so far."
I'd want them to work on the technology a bit before this happened though. Wouldn't want the plane suddenly falling apart way up in the sky.
GERONIMO!!!!
...in november's issue of scientific american entitled "Flying on flexible wings"
you may find the Higgs in this signature.
go-go-gadget mophing wings!
I wonder if they have ever heard of variable geometry swing wings. They seem to work well on teh F-14, F-111, B-1B, MiG-23/27, etc.
So it will be a long time before you catch a plane and watch the wings disappear by looking through the window.
Not if you fly USAir!
Normal Airplane by day, Surveilance Death plane by night. This will be called Viper 2. (grin)
You know...
...that thing had better be sporting a Decepticon insignia.
The coolest voice ever.
Dont some fighter jets do this? Moving in some wings at certain speeds to increase stabality, etc?
Anything that bends that isn't organic tends to eventually weaken and break. And the organic stuff only manages to keep structural integrity through constant ongoing repair.
The maintenance up-time required for a flexing wing will probably be ridiculous, unless it contains self-repairing abilities.
This is cool and all, but FYI the Concorde had something very similar for decades: the cross section of the wing (or of a good part of the wing) would change thickness to accommodate supersonic flight (thinner wing->better supersonic performance).
There seems to be a common theme of altered wing shape in the recen aeronautical research. The other experiment done was to reduce noise in supersonic flight.
_____
Thank you.
Airplanes, whether manned or unmanned, need to travel at various speeds.
Sweet Zeus, what a revelation.
I also did not realize that it would ever be possible to make wings disappear by looking through a window.
Where's my flying car?
The U.S. F-14 and F-111, European Tornado, and a bunch of Russian Tupolev and Sukhoi models have had variable-geometry wings for decades. This is hardly a new concept -- just snazzier ways of doing it.
In principio creauit Linus Linucem.
I seem to recall that there are also effeciency benefits to such "Morphing Wing" technology.
I seem to recall that one of the Wright brothers observed that birds seem to turn by twisting their wings, and actually built the Wright Flyer with cables that twisted the wings in order to control it.
I got your prior art right here!
The Wright brothers airplanes used a wing warp
method to control the flight. This is described in their patent. although the wing shape (the chord) did not change, the ends of the wing did. So it is interesting that their original concept (to imitate birds) was dropped (from 1905-2004) and is now being revived.
Right now, the team has only built a tabletop model.
I've invented a device that will convert ordinary cat dander into light sweet crude. No, I haven't actually tried to run it yet, but I do have this cool tabletop model.
This space intentionally left blank.
--I don't know much about fighter planes but didn't the F-14 Tomcat (or something like that) have this ability to change its wingspan from being outward during regular flight and coming inwards during dog-fighting for more maneuverability? Around Mach 1, the F-14 sweeps it's wings in to reduce stability and lessen the drag. It extends them at lower speeds for maneuverability and lift, and for dogfighting.
F-111 Mission Adaptive Wing (MAW). Flight test results here
No, not just changing the sweep as in a normal -111, -14, B-1, Mig-27 or Blackjack, but rather the shape of the wing changes as needed.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
There's .... oh, no, it's just changing shape again.
The Concorde wing is static, except for the obvious movable control surfaces. Does not change shape in flight.
I think you're right! In fact, I think you should e-mail, or better yet, travel to U Penn personally and tell both the professor of aerospace engineering and a doctoral candidate that they both have totally missed the boat and are totally ignorant about swing wings!
You is the man! We at slashdot are eagerly awaiting more stupifyingly news of the obvious!
The more they stay the same.
What sort of voodu does one need to have to have to make things disappear just by looking at them? I hope no terrorists are on these flights and have notions of looking out the window. Soon the FAA will screen all passengers for passengers attempting to smuggle "eyes" onto the airplane.
Those blind people have it good! Their planes always have lift.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Airplane wings that change shape like a bird's have scales like a fish
Morphing HECS wing: showing the unmorphed and morphiged configurations. The wing tips are bent downwards to provide yaw control.(Courtsey: NASA Langley)
Full size image available through contact
To maximize a plane's efficiency over a broader range of flight speeds, Penn State engineers have developed a concept for morphing airplane wings that change shape like a bird's and are covered with a segmented outer skin like the scales of a fish.
Dr. George Lesieutre, professor of aerospace engineering who leads the project, says, "Airplanes today are a design compromise. They have a fixed-wing structure that is not ideal for every part of a typical flight. Being able to change the shape of the wings to reduce drag and power, which vary with flight speed, could optimize fuel consumption so that commercial planes could fly more efficiently."
Dr. George Lesieutre (left), professor of aerospace engineering, Penn State and Deepak Ramrahkyani (right), doctoral candidate in aerospace engineering with tabletop model of the complaint cellular truss structure. Credit: Penn State, Greg Grieco
Full size image available through contact
Morphing wings can also be useful for military defense and homeland security when applied to unmanned surveillance planes that need to fly quickly to a distant point, loiter at slow speed for a period of time and then return, Lesieutre explains. Flying efficiently at high speed requires small, perhaps, swept wings. Flying at slow speed for long periods requires long narrow wings. The morphing wings designed by the Penn State team can change both wing area and cross section shape to accommodate both slow and fast flight requirements.
Lesieutre and the wing design team will detail their concept in a paper, "Tendon Actuated Compliant Cellular Truss For Morphing Aircraft Structures," on Tuesday, April 20, at the 45th AIAA/ASME/ASCE/AHA/ASC Structures, Structural Dynamics and Materials Conference in Palm Springs, Calif. The authors are Lesieutre; Dr. Mary Frecker, associate professor of mechanical engineering; Deepak Ramrakhyani, doctoral candidate in aerospace engineering; and Smita Bharti, doctoral candidate in mechanical engineering.
The essential features of the Penn State concept are a small-scale, efficient compliant cellular truss structure, highly distributed tendon actuation and a segmented skin. The cellular truss structure is the skeleton of the wing. The skeleton is formed of repeating diamond-shaped units made from straight metal members connected at the angles with bendable or "compliant" shape memory alloys. Tendons in each unit, like the ropes that shape a tent, can pull the units into new configurations that will spring back, thanks to the shape memory alloys, when the tendon tension is released.
Since the underlying structure can undergo radical shape change, the overlaying skin of the wing must be able to change with it. Lesieutre says a concept that he thinks holds great promise is a segmented skin composed of overlapping plates, like the scales of a fish. He notes that conveyers on the baggage carousel in airports are composed of a similar pattern of plates.
So far, the design team has built a tabletop model of the compliant cellular truss structure and a computer graphic model of the wing structure.
###
The project is supported by grants from NASA and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
Apple has never claimed not to be evil, they're just very stylish about it.
Actually commercial aircraft have to fly in many different conditions. Flying out of SFO is completely different then flighting out of DEN first in air density and then there are different weather conditions.
If Boeing or Airbus could offer an aircraft that could take off out of Denver on a hot day with the same payload capabilities as flying out of SFO on a cold day, they would have alot of buyers.
Once they're at cruising altitude you could change your wing to cruise settings for that maximum distance based on total weight and alter that durring the flight to minimize induced drag.
Sounds like the /. editors are speechless!
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
One of the reasons that aircraft designers have moved away from swinging variable-geometry wings is the inherent weight and complexity penalty.
A swing-wing VG aircraft is inevitably heavier than a non-swing-wing aircraft. Gains from the more efficient aerodynamic shape are eaten up by having to support a greater weight of wing structure, which has bad effects on things like power-to-weight ratio and wing loading. On top of that, the greater mechanical complexity leads to a higher maintenance load, usually expressed in Maintenance Man-Hours per Flight Hour (MMHFH).
This project looks like much of the same. Modern aircraft wings are monocoque, and have very little internal structure (although the space may be filled by other things like fuel tankage). These wings would require a lot of heavy internal structure to accomplish the effect, thus losing the benefits of the more efficient airfoil. Plus, the MMHFH ratio must be pretty awful with hundreds of little actuators.
On top of that, what are the failure modes? What happens if one of those actuators fails in the middle of a shift? Does the wing rip itself apart?
Move along folks, nothing to see here.
--Paul
ha! I knew they would run out of deptartments someday
I have no developed opinion on the bararity of foo. -homeobocks, Gentoo Forums
Its the cross section of the wing that changes, not the angle or length of the wing.
God, root, what is the difference?
Who is Roland Piquepaille? His submissions seem to show up here every other day (and always contain a pointer to his blog so he can collect some advertising eyeballs).
Other way around: swept for high speed, forward for low speed.
After a number of experiments in the late 60s and 70s (F-14, F-111, B-1, Tornado, MiG-23/37, Su-24), engineers seem to have decided that swing wings aren't worth the extra cost, weight, and maintenance. Computerized flight control systems that can handle the instability of swept wings at low speed have taken some of the reason for building a swing wing away. But maybe it's a fad that will come around again.
Now, if you want weird, check out the AD-1, which has a single wing that pivots on the fuselage like a pair of scissors; one wing goes forward when the other one pivots back.
This particular article is more about changing the cross-section of the wing than its planform.
I've never seen a Big 10 school that's full of pretentious people, and I went to one.
It must be fast like an exocoetidae.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
The couple of times I've had a window seat on commercial flights (various Boeing 7x7s, and MD-80s) I distinctly saw movable flaps being used to change the shape of the wing during take-offs and landings.
the formal term for this is called "aeroelastic tailoring". the wright brothers did use it to control the roll of the wright flyer, they called it "wing warping", it was their solution to steering in 3 dimensions. it was so difficult to do with the stronger wings that they started using ailerons instead.
as for the f-14 and variable geometry wings, it's not quite the same. moving the wings back and forth help with things like shock waves and control fading/reversal at high speeds.
we use the math now to determine if the wings of an airplane will rip off without warning, a phenomenon called "divergence". as for the complicated maintence issue, every plane goes through this, although they don't actively change their wings. if you watch the wings the next time you fly somewhere, you'll see they bounce up and down. the math is done during construction and testing to make sure that the airplane can deform as it needs to and still stay in the air.
who says college doesn't teach you anything? now if i could just pass the final in this class on monday...
Also, I would guess these wings aren't going to be very strong. I don't think they will safely be able to transmit the lift that they generate along their length to the body of the aircraft.
Might work for small UAVs though, since they're smaller, and lighter.
This is not a sig
the NERO Institute of Aeroflight has their own design and it suposedly claims to be even better than the ones presented here. click here
Can't be a community college. Don't they have a football team, or something?
Make it man-wearable dragon-shape flying metalic armor and I'll call it really geeky.
There you are, staring at me again.
While it was cybernetically linked, this kind of thing was predicted with the YF-21 (the wings/rudder/tail would morph upon the pilots command).
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
I have read about a very similar patent in a Russian techincal journal ("Yunii Tehnik" the guys from former USSR will know what I am talking about) back in the early nineties. It was a proposal to change the shape of a wing using a compressed gas and some sort of a baloon inside the wing. The wings on some of the supersonic planes already can change their angle relative to the fuselage and that would have allowed it to change the profile (cross-section) too. Thick profile - good at slow speeds, thin - at supersonic. But don't quote me on this, I am not an aerospace guy, just remembered that article for some reason.
Kind of:
From Bruce Sterling's short story Deep Eddy:
Then later:
Is it just me or does their prototype look like an industrial strength Hoberman toy?
During landing, take off, turbulent flight... the wings shake and shudder a bit. In fact an older issue of AIR International detailed the wing flex testing of the A380, which showed that it could adequately handle wingtip deviations of several feet. My point is that modern aircraft materials are already designed to withstand the inevitable flexing caused by normal flight. We don't see wings just disintegrating after rough flights, do we?
Modern aluminum alloys with a carbon fiber/resin infrastructure could handle these well known aeroelastic stresses. One shouldn't just lay a blanket of assumption saying that any non-natural bending material that retains strength is impossible, though handling the problems of aeroelasticity remains a very active research area.
DUMBJOKE!
no
i think its a good idea for them to finally try something new.. its always good to break away from the iconoclastic thought patern.
How often would you have to re-orient the wing shape based on the consumption of fuel then??
PLAYING CARDS
Printend in the U.S.A. on fine European Paper
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~mingust
Just another "isn't that theoretically cool - too bad none of this will ever come to fruition" story. Other examples:
- some amazing new display technology that allows us super-bright 300 DPI displays for $10 per square foot and can be painted onto walls
- some amazing battery technology that promises to power laptops for a week and ocean liners for a year
- some amazing new memory technology promising terabytes of ultra-fast storage that will usher in instant-on supercomputing
How about they invent a stupid pill so we can all take it and believe this technology will ever amount to anything?
Something like this gets proposed every year at any school with an aeromech engineering major. The problem is that the force required to change the shape of the wings at the speeds the planes travel is rediculous. You'd need a whole other engine just for the wing shape changes. One presentation I went to for something like this also had a different engine for the lower speeds. Good idea but too hard to impliment.
Would completely depend on what it was designed for. If you really wanted to you could morph constantly in minute differences as the fuel was used. Or do it every half hour or anything in between. I doubt you would see much difference in performance from changing every second to changing every thirty minutes. You would see a large increase in system requirements though. A classic engineering problem, find the optimal solution among an infinate solution set.
If anybody has seen Macross Plus, they know the YF-21 had wings like this.
They're already working on powered body armor and brain controlled computers, what other tech from anime will we see soon.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
The real question is whether the new scheme can be made sufficiently reliable/low cost to use in production aircraft.
Of course I didn't RTFM - that would be cheating!
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Now that is wierd..never seen that before.
One of the technologies swept wings are being replaced with is thrust vectoring, which allows the plane to change the direction of the engine exaust, this allows a plane with a good pilot/computer to have extreme manuverability compared to normal aircraft.
The F-22 has up/down thrust vectoring, the X-31 has full directional controls, as well as the Su-35(or 37, not sure). One trick ive seen the Su do is to vector the thrust upwards as far as it will go, while pulling back on the stick, which turns so rapidly that for a short time the plane flies backwards...the vectoring also helps with nearly instant recovery of the insuing stall.
Upon some further googling, I found some info on the X-44 MANTA project, which is a modified F22 with uses thrust vectoring to completely replace almost all control surfaces (still in concept stage) X-44 Concept Drawing
"watch the wings disappear by looking through the window"....how is looking at them going to make them disappear?
This is so primitive it's hard to know if it's not some kind
of joke.
I guess if it allows the payment of a stipend, then there's at
least one person who will benefit from it...
Back in the 60s and 70s, Pat Beatty and Fritz Johl did similar work with glider wings. Obviously, with much different technology. They flew their prototypes, and raced them competitively. In addition to variable-geometry, they also expeimented with variable-span!
The technology of the day was far less sophisticated than today, but it's an interesting bit of aeronautical history nonetheless.
Although I met Pat Beatty once or twice during the early 80s, I was too young to have seen his variable-geometry and variable-span creations fly, first hand. Most of what I know about them I heard from the old-timers in my flying club, who had been active in gliding competition during the 60s.
Sadly, there seems to be very little surviving literature available on the Beatty and Beatty-Johl designs. Google turns up a few grainy photographs, and articles in ancient editions of Soaring Magazine and Krautkorant (Cape Gliding Club Newsletter), but that's about it.
Pat's wife Beatty Rowell also made significant contributions to aviation, both as a pilot and meteorologist, and wrote the book "Just for the Love of Flying". Time for a re-read, I think.
For something intelligent on this topic, see this DARPA/Boeing presentation. DARPA has a number of "smart airfoil" projects. They've tried shape memory alloys. They've tried ferroelectric fluids. They've tried piezoelectric materials. It looks like the first flight test will be a piezoelectric system on the rotor blades of an MD-900 helicopter.
It's not yet clear that it's worth the trouble, but R&D continues.
From the look of the model, tension is applied through strings or cables. As a pilot, I don't think I am ready to trust that till they start using a solid linkage. I had a rudder cable on a C172 snap once, and I really never want to try and land like that again. I can't imagine trusting my wings to that, especially my ailerons.
No ailerons, no getting home. Rudder and elevators won't steer a plane.
"Curiosity killed the cat, but for a while I was a suspect."- Steven Wright
It's about time Mystique found some honest work.
We're probably just using different definitions for the same word, but wings flex more than "a bit," at least in my way of thinking.
This link from our German friends has some interesting pics on destructive testing. Even small wings can bend several feet and still function. Airliner size wings flex many feet, and can scare the piss out of people that aren't prepared for it.
Sometimes the discovery channel will air video of a test-to-destruction done on a wing. It's truly scary.
I think these people maybe kidding themselves if they think their technology can scale up. It's easy to make stiff moving parts when things are small. Making moving parts that are strong and flexible enough to take a beating for 30 years and still have them be light enough is no small trick. An airliner wing is a wonderful multi-million dollar beast. They can and do bend meters in normal operation. Of course I am certainly no engineer and I wish these guys luck.
Why do I have this? I don't smoke.
One of every five new came from him. It is earning something for this.
remember the hijacked personal aircraft in 'Flight 714' :)
... that this will enable a fundamental change in the shape of the whole wing as opposed to just the trailing edge. I don't think they're trying to claim that just 'changing the shape at all' is their breakthrough.
---
We spoke for about a half an hour. I don't recall a thing we said. - Colorblind James Experience
I'm not sure I'd want to fly in a plane with flapping wings, but morphing surfaces might be a boost to these guys, who are working on ornithopters (and must be avid Frank Herbert fans). The video of their 1/4 proof of concept in flight is pretty interesting.
It's good that PSU is a party school, because it gets the idiot frat boy business majors out of the labs so we can do real research!
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
Steel, for one, exhibits a fatigue limit where repeated deformation lowers its ultimate strength, but so long as its not excessive has a lower bound where it stops getting weaker.
I'm sure many plastics exhibit similar properties. As with most metals the real challenge is degredation of the materials due to enviromental factors.
Didn't they increase thier span? It would also be cool to expand/contract the cord.
Come the revolution, the Bourgeois, Capitalistic, "A PARKING STICKER HOLDERS", will be first against the wall!
The Wright Borthers patents on warping wing design, and all the me-too patents that followed it, have finally expired. These guys are just trying to avoid all the modern aviation patents by going back to expired patent technology.
It's all about saving money on patent licenses, don' 'cha know.
There is nothing so silly as other peoples traditions, and nothing so sacred as our own.
They're not fish scales, but I Think it's been done before. Granted that doesn't help efficiency, but I think these do.
What the heck is a 'sig'?
The next step towards improved nanotechnology i hope.
Dean Ing wrote about this in the 80's in THE RANSOM OF BLACK STEALTH ONE
3 12 034725/qid=1083005523/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/102-777401 9-5681751?v=glance&s=books#product-details
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0
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Yet more Slashdot Stupdity. (Maybe I should copywrite the phrase....) This is an R&D project. Saying that it is useless because of possible falure modes or fuel srorage problems is like looking at a very eary car and saying "It will never replace the horse". This is not insightful, it is ignorant.
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