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Technical Paper

Stability-Based Motion Planning for a Modular Morphing Wing

2013-09-17
2013-01-2323
Aircraft wing geometry morphing is a technology that has seen recent interest due to demand for aircraft to improve aerodynamic performance for fuel saving. One proposed idea to alter wing geometry is by a modular morphing wing designed through a discretization method and constructed using variable geometry truss mechanisms (VGTM). For each morphing maneuver, there are sixteen possible actuation paths for each VGTM module. This paper proposes a method to find an optimal actuation path from the point of view of the longitudinal static stability. To do so, we locate the aerodynamic center (ac) and the center of gravity (cg) of each VGTM module which is first determined according to its morphed shape. Then, the ac and cg of the entire modular morphing wing can be determined and the stability margin can be computed. The two suggested methods to obtaining the ac for each VGTM module are the integration method and the geometry method.
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