Changing the shape of wing design using "digital materials"

Though we're used to airplane wings with moving flaps that control
the craft's movements, the first flying machine built by the Wright
brothers in 1908 used a different technique called wing warping.
Instead of tilting airfoils attached to the trailing edges of wings,
warping uses wires and pulleys to alter the shape of wood and canvas
wings to perform the function that ailerons and flaps do in modern
airplanes.

According to the NASA/MIT team, there have been numerous attempts to
revive this technology, but these have relied on mechanisms inside
the wing to bend it. The problem has been that this machinery usually
turns out to be too heavy and complicated, which offsets any
increases in aerodynamic efficiency.

A newly developed wing architecture could greatly simplify the
manufacturing process and reduce fuel consumption by...

The NASA/MIT approach is to not just do away with the internal
mechanism, but to fundamentally redesign the structure of the wing so
it is capable of bending by itself. The design achieves this by
dividing the wing into lightweight, overlapping scale- or
feather-like sub-segments. These are supported by tunable and
actively deformable modular building blocks, dubbed "digital
materials," that are made of carbon fiber-reinforced polymers that
can be quickly engineered and snapped together and allow the wing to
deform while maintaining a smooth, aerodynamic surface.

This modular approach would allow the individual support pieces to be
mass produced and combined in an almost endless variety of shapes,
which could be constructed by simple minature robots that crawl along
the exterior or even the interior of the structure as it is
constructed. Though the researchers have already developed prototype
robots, they built the initial test structure by hand and used skin
panels instead of scales that would be used the ultimate version.

The units used were morphed manually using two small motors to twist
the wingtips and bend the wing uniformly along its entire length. The
purpose of this test piece was to get the wing to twist in the same
manner as if it was made of separate scales instead of panels by
fine-tuning the structure so it twists on command into the desired
aerodynamic shape.

So far, wind tunnel tests have shown the test wing has aerodynamic
properties of a conventional wing weighing 10 times more. The team
then built a drone aircraft flown from the ground by a certified test
pilot, who found it responsive enough to do aerobatics.

Gershenfeld sees this technology as not only leading to
super-efficient long-range drones, but as having applications beyond
aerospace engineering, inlcuding in wind turbines, skyscrapers,
bridges, and space structures. It could also be used to create soft
robots that can bend wherever desired without joints, are lighter
than equivalent robots, yet can maintain the desired level of
stiffness for the job. Repairs of machines built with the units would
be cheaper and easier as damaged units could be replaced by
maintenance robots with new ones.

MIT <http://news.mit.edu/2016/morphing-airplane-wing-design-1103
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John Dinkel

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