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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.
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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).
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.
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.
What always interested me about that silver-blob-thing was that when it changed to go fast, the front seemed to become the back, and the back the front. I'm not sure that pilots would get use to the idea of flying backward (unless they fly helecopters that is)
Karma? Hey I just call it as I see it.
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).
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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.
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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.
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.
remember the hijacked personal aircraft in 'Flight 714' :)
Dean Ing wrote about this in the 80's in THE RANSOM OF BLACK STEALTH ONE
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http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0
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