Cambered airfoil
Ĭamber morphing helps enhancing the maximum lift coefficient, and increasing the aerodynamic efficiency, which directly affects the range and endurance. 2011 Barbarino S, Bilgen O, Friswell MI, Ajaj RM, Inman DJ (2011) A review of morphing aircraft. Keeping the thickness constant and varying the camber is called camber morphing ( Barbarino et al. Modifying parameters, such as thickness or camber, can be considered as airfoil morphing.
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The morphing of the wing shape can be categorized into three types, namely: planform, airfoil, and out-of plane morphing ( Barbarino et al. Morphing the wing shape enables an aircraft to give optimized performance over a wider margin of flight conditions.
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Conventionally, aircrafts are designed to give optimum performance for a narrow range of flight conditions. Wing morphing enables us to extend the flight envelope, and reduce the need to use traditional control surfaces. The word “morphing” derives its meaning from the Greek root of metamorphoses, which implies change ( Barbarino et al. Friswell 2014 Friswell MI (2014) Morphing aircraft: an improbable dream? Proceedings of the ASME 2014 Conference on Smart Materials, Adaptive Structures and Intelligent Systems: Newport, USA. 2012 Vasista S, Tong L, Wong KC (2012) Realization of morphing wings: a multidisciplinary challenge. Recently, research in the area of morphing is gaining a lot of attention in the aerospace domain ( Barbarino et al. Inspired by the drag reductions observed, a case study is presented for resizing a SUAV accounting for the mass addition due to the morphing system retaining the benefits of drag reduction.Ĭamber morphing SUAV design Drag reduction Aerodynamic efficiency Interestingly, some morphed airfoil configurations show a reduction in drag coefficient of 1.21 to 15.17% compared to the target airfoil over a range of flight altitudes for cruise and loiter phases. The target airfoil performance could be closely achieved by combinations of 5 to 8 morphed configurations, the best of which were selected from a pool of thirty morphed airfoil configurations for the typical design specifications of SUAV. In total, thirty morphed airfoil configurations were generated and tested for aerodynamic efficiency at the Reynolds numbers of 2.5 × 10 5 and 4.8 × 10 5, corresponding to loiter and cruise Reynolds numbers of a typical SUAV. Camber morphing using discrete elements was used to morph the base airfoil, which was split into two, three, and four elements, respectively, to achieve new configurations, into the target one. This paper proposes a methodology to harvest the benefits of camber morphing airfoils for small unmanned aerial vehicle (SUAV) applications.