Design of kinematic mechanism of morphing wing with functionally gradient metamaterial skin

Paper in proceedings (conference paper)

en

Morphing aircraft wings provide a nature-inspired solution to reduce air drag for different phases of flight, thereby reducing overall fuel consumption and environmental impact. A wing leading edge composed of a flexible metamaterial skin and a rigid kinematic mechanism that changes the skin profile into target shapes is proposed. The design process consists of two parts – A) the finding of the geometric parameters of the skin with gradient bending stiffness, and B) the synthesis of the kinematic mechanism. The metamaterial skin is represented by a simplified spring model describing significant mechanical properties of the structure. The advantage of this approach is the significantly reduced computational time to simulate this complex metamaterial geometry compared to the use of other modeling methods such as FEM. A differential evolution (DE) algorithm is used to optimize the geometric parameters of the skin to find a suitable combination of the geometric parameters of the structure to minimize deviation of the achieved deformed shape of the skin from the target shapes. At the same time, the effect of aerodynamic loads is already included at this stage of the skin design as beneficial forces helping with the skin deformation. The rigid morphing mechanism is designed using vector method based on the optimized positions of attachment points. A demonstrator is fabricated using 3D printing based on the optimized geometry of the skin and morphing mechanism.

Morphing wing; Functionally graded metamaterial skin; Differential evolution optimization; Kinematic mechanism; Gradient bending stiffness

2025-08-07

CRC Press

London

9781003677895

Engineering Materials, Structures, Systems and Methods for a More Sustainable Future

928–933

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