Morphing Wing for Lighter Weight, More Agile Aircraft

When the Wright Brothers first flew over 100 years ago, they used a twisting wing to stabilize their plane. As aircraft design became more heavy duty, that system became impossible and rigid wings controlled by flaps have been the mainstay for modern aviation. University of Michigan aerospace engineers are revisiting the idea of the morphing wing using a multifunctional system of composite lightweight materials and integrated actuators. These morphing wings are still in the developing stages but may open the doors to lighter weight aircraft that are more agile than traditional airplanes.

Transcript

00:00:00 for the last few years we've been researching very heavily the idea of morphine aircraft is are shape-changing aircraft to affect flight control but rather they change the shape of their wings to affect flight control the original flight R Brothers flight didn't have conventional flaps it had a wing twist phenomena so the wings were very lightweight and they Twisted them to get

00:00:23 flight control so that you could say would be the original motivation or the original morphing effort is it moving there we go what we're doing now is really based on and motivated by watching birds and how they fly if you look at a bird it has maybe a hundred feathers along its wingspan and it'll move three or four of them together as one muscle and so it can make one go up

00:00:49 and one go down so it can create sort of a serpentine shape along its the profile of its wing we can't do that with any aircraft but we can do that with this material so this is a original version the thing that makes this contouring possible is a thing called a macrofiber composite actuator big word it's basically a pazo electric composite that means that the structure and the

00:01:16 actuation device are all one thing so there's no mechanism like there is in a traditional airplane so that means it's potentially lighter and it can do these unusual Maneuvers that a bird can do the material which was invented in 2000 allows us to do things that we couldn't do with traditional materials because it's an active material which means it changes its shape according to an

00:01:39 electrical input people don't like to think High Voltage in in an aircraft one of my students figured out a a nice lightway compact DC DC conversion device to change the high voltage need to a low voltage need and the current was minuscule so really the power was not bad so the project now is is still sort of in the developing stages where we've uh built some prototypes which is a long

00:02:05 process you build some and throw them away build new ones try again tested them in a wind tunnel in the future I expect this technology to be limited to unmanned aerial Vehicles the FAA is a huge Force it's a good Force but it puts so many roadblocks in terms of new technologies on aircraft that I think it'll be decades and decades before any type of morphing technology shows up on

00:02:28 an actual airplane one of the questions that comes up in morphing if the wght brothers had already thought about having a a twisting Wing to do flight control why is every airplane past that time use conventional discrete flaps or control surfaces the answer to that is in order to twist the wing with a reasonable amount of actuation the wing has to be very lightweight being very

00:02:54 lightweight and flexible means it flutters very early which means the plane can't go very fast now we can re-evaluate that possibility because we have new materials and because the materials themselves that form the structure are actually actuation devices as well so it's sort of a multi-functional system that allows us to revisit this concept that the Wright

00:03:19 brothers more or less started my particular area of focus is on autonomous systems looking at how I can either make the system behave in a more intelligent way or have it handle anomalies which is a big issue in Aerospace right now