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Enhanced Range and Endurance Evaluation of a Camber Morphing Wing Aircraft

Flight range, endurance, maneuverability, and agility are the key elements that determine an aircraft’s performance. Both conventional and morphing wing aircraft have been well studied and estimated in all aspects of performance. When considering the performance of morphing aircraft, most works addr...

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Autores principales: Jo, Bruce W., Majid, Tuba
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2023
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9844294/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36648820
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/biomimetics8010034
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author Jo, Bruce W.
Majid, Tuba
author_facet Jo, Bruce W.
Majid, Tuba
author_sort Jo, Bruce W.
collection PubMed
description Flight range, endurance, maneuverability, and agility are the key elements that determine an aircraft’s performance. Both conventional and morphing wing aircraft have been well studied and estimated in all aspects of performance. When considering the performance of morphing aircraft, most works address aspects of the aerodynamical performance such as [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text] as well as flight envelopes for flight dynamics and control perspectives. However, the actual benefits of adopting morphing technologies in practical aspects such as aircraft operation, mission planning, and sustainability have not been addressed so far. Thus, this paper addresses the practical aspect of the benefits when adopting a camber morphing wing aircraft. Identical geometrical and computational conditions were applied to an already-existing aircraft: the RQ-7a Shadow. The wing structure was switched between a fixed wing and a camber morphing wing to generate conventional and morphing wing geometries. The fixed-wing cases had varying flap deflection angles, and the camber morphing wing cases had varying camber rates from 4% to 8%. Once the [Formula: see text] values of the fixed and morphing wing cases were matched up to two significant figures, the [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text] were analyzed for these matching cases to calculate the flight endurance, range, and improvement. When NACA 6410 is adopted, a 17% improvement in flight range and endurance average was expected. In the case of NACA 8410, an average 60% improvement was expected.
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spelling pubmed-98442942023-01-18 Enhanced Range and Endurance Evaluation of a Camber Morphing Wing Aircraft Jo, Bruce W. Majid, Tuba Biomimetics (Basel) Article Flight range, endurance, maneuverability, and agility are the key elements that determine an aircraft’s performance. Both conventional and morphing wing aircraft have been well studied and estimated in all aspects of performance. When considering the performance of morphing aircraft, most works address aspects of the aerodynamical performance such as [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text] as well as flight envelopes for flight dynamics and control perspectives. However, the actual benefits of adopting morphing technologies in practical aspects such as aircraft operation, mission planning, and sustainability have not been addressed so far. Thus, this paper addresses the practical aspect of the benefits when adopting a camber morphing wing aircraft. Identical geometrical and computational conditions were applied to an already-existing aircraft: the RQ-7a Shadow. The wing structure was switched between a fixed wing and a camber morphing wing to generate conventional and morphing wing geometries. The fixed-wing cases had varying flap deflection angles, and the camber morphing wing cases had varying camber rates from 4% to 8%. Once the [Formula: see text] values of the fixed and morphing wing cases were matched up to two significant figures, the [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text] were analyzed for these matching cases to calculate the flight endurance, range, and improvement. When NACA 6410 is adopted, a 17% improvement in flight range and endurance average was expected. In the case of NACA 8410, an average 60% improvement was expected. MDPI 2023-01-13 /pmc/articles/PMC9844294/ /pubmed/36648820 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/biomimetics8010034 Text en © 2023 by the authors. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Article
Jo, Bruce W.
Majid, Tuba
Enhanced Range and Endurance Evaluation of a Camber Morphing Wing Aircraft
title Enhanced Range and Endurance Evaluation of a Camber Morphing Wing Aircraft
title_full Enhanced Range and Endurance Evaluation of a Camber Morphing Wing Aircraft
title_fullStr Enhanced Range and Endurance Evaluation of a Camber Morphing Wing Aircraft
title_full_unstemmed Enhanced Range and Endurance Evaluation of a Camber Morphing Wing Aircraft
title_short Enhanced Range and Endurance Evaluation of a Camber Morphing Wing Aircraft
title_sort enhanced range and endurance evaluation of a camber morphing wing aircraft
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9844294/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36648820
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/biomimetics8010034
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