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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."
...in november's issue of scientific american entitled "Flying on flexible wings"
you may find the Higgs in this signature.
My guess is that this "next greatest thing" isn't the answer either, but almost anything is better than a swing wing.
Is it fascism yet?
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.
The Concorde wing is static, except for the obvious movable control surfaces. Does not change shape in flight.
I wonder if Slashdotters ever read the fucking article.
They're talking about the use of memory alloys for a flexible wing which, in tandem with the segmented skin, will allow the wings to be deformed in-flight to adjust its aerodynamic properties. Think of it like having a wing with hundreds or thousands of flaps which could be raised or lowered in sections to change the profile of the wing to fit any situation.
Oh, remind me: where'd you study aeronautics?
Rubber bags are correct. Just like the fuel cell bladder in most forms of racing you can think of. Normally reinforced with kevlar and othe fibers to make them punture resistant. They just plain work.
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
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.
Actually, you're right. I'm just joining the discussion, so I don't know if anyone's mentioned it, but there was an F-111 test vehicle which included variable-camber, as well as variable sweep, wings. It was part of the AFTI program, which also related to some axis decoupling (for lack of a better term) work with a modified F-16 with canards. This particular project was known as the Mission Adaptive Wing.
most Al alloys have no endurance limit and thus will always eventually (maybe in 1 min or 10000 years) fail by fatigue if they do not fail some other way first
Even if this isn't exactly the same application as the Wright's Wing Warping, the point of both is to change the aerodynamics of the wing by changing its geometery. This is just the latest in a long line of attempts. In the 1980's NASA came up with the scissors wing to address exactly this problem -- swept wing for the fast transit to the station point, straight wing for loitering on station. In the 1990's Boeing won a contract to re-wing a bunch of Navy jets with flexible composite wings -- with no slats, flaps, or ailerons.
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
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.