Morphing Winglets for Aircraft Multi-Phase Improvement

Abstract

The technology paradigm presented in this paper is to provide active control of winglet structure subject to external stimuli to meet operational performance criteria, by means of smart actuation integration. A tier schedule is employed to develop application to take full advantage of material compliance through MDO to form functionally active integrated non-planar wing, to improve multi-phase mission performance, manoeuvrability and integrated economics (e.g., 5-6% augmented aerodynamic eciency throughout the flight envelope, compared to 3% of current fixed winglets). This paper presents the first steps of the hierarchical methodology (i.e., smart actuation ecient down-selection) towards the final morphing application (i.e., MORPHLET), through the technology selection and preliminary optimized non-planar wing schedules.