Preliminary design of an adaptive aileron for next generation regional aircraft

Abstract

Design of morphing wings at increasing TRL is common to several research programs worldwide. They are focused on the improvement of their performance that can be expressed in several ways, indeed: aerodynamic efficiency optimization, fuel consumption reduction, COx and NOx emission reduction and so on, or targeted to overcome the classical drawbacks related to the introduction of a novel technology such as system complexity increase and management of certification aspects. The Consortium for Research and Innovation in Aerospace in Quebec (CRIAQ) lunched project MD0505 that can be inserted in this crowded frame. The target of this cooperation, involving Canadian and Italian academies and a research centre, is the development of a camber "morphing aileron" integrated on an innovative full scale wing tip of the next generation regional aircraft. This paper focuses on the preliminary design and the numerical modeling of its architecture. The structural layout is, at the beginning, described in detail and furthermore, a finite element (FE) model of the entire aileron architecture is assessed and used to verify the structural integrity under prescribed operational conditions.

Aeroelastic Stability Analysis of a Wind Tunnel Wing Model Equipped with a True Scale Morphing Aileron

“…The rib mechanism therefore uses a three-segment polygonal line to approximate the camber of the airfoil and to morph it into the desired configuration while keeping the airfoil thickness distribution unchanged [10].…”

“…Upon the actuation of the ribs, all the boxes are put into movement, thus changing the external shape of the aileron; if the rotation of any rib blocks is prevented by locking the actuation chain, the multi-box structure is elastically stable under the action of external aerodynamic loads. A four-bay (five-rib) layout was considered for an overall (true-scale) span of 1.4m; AL2024-T351 alloy was used for spars, stringers and rib plates, while C50 steel was used for the ribs' links [10]. The external structure is made up of segmented aluminum-alloy skin embedding standard gap-filler, as shown in Fig The ribs' kinematic is based on a oscillating glyph mechanism which transforms the actuator shaft rotation into a rib deflection by means of a leverage directly linked to the rib plate.…”

“…The wing-box, designed by the Canadian Team, has a conventional structural architecture equipped with a flexible composite skin on the upper surface of the dry area between spars, which will be morphed by a set of actuators [9]. The morphing aileron (designed by the Italian team) is made up of segmented adaptive ribs to achieve transition from baseline configuration to a desired target shape [10].…”

Description of Position Control Laws for Functionality Test of a Bi-modal Morphing Flap

“…The relative rotation between rib segments was measured with encoders corresponding to the hinges between consecutive blocks, as described in Section 3. These sensors made it possible to monitor the achieved morphed shapes and check for their full co mpliance with the design values [18].…”

Aerodynamic Shape Design and Validation of an Advanced High-Lift Device for a Regional Aircraft with Morphing Droop Nose

“…Recently, different EU projects, such as SADE and SAR-ISTU, started from Monner's work to design a portion of a full-scale morphing droop nose composed of two main parts: a compliant skin and a rigid kinematic mechanism obtained by an integrate design [10]. Other projects also concerned the development of morphing flap [11,12] and morphing trailing edge [13,14] devices for the load control in both high-speed and low-speed conditions.…”