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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!
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!
You know...
...that thing had better be sporting a Decepticon insignia.
The coolest voice ever.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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!
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.
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
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?
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.
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
Kind of:
From Bruce Sterling's short story Deep Eddy:
Then later:
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.
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Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
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.
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.