Recent Progress on Aeroelasticity of High-Performance Morphing UAVs

Abstract

The high-performance morphing aircraft has become a research focus all over the world. The morphing aircraft, unlike regular unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), has more complicated aerodynamic characteristics, making itmore difficultto conduct its design, model analysis, and experimentation. This paper reviews the recent process and the current status of aeroelastic issues, numerical simulations, and wind tunnel test of morphing aircrafts. The evaluation of aerodynamic characteristics, mechanism, and relevant unsteady dynamic aerodynamic modeling throughout the morphing process are the primary technological bottlenecks formorphing aircrafts. The unstable aerodynamic forces have a significant impact on the aircraft handling characteristics, control law design, and flight safety. In the past, the structural analysis of morphing aircrafts, flight dynamics modeling, computational mesh morphing technology, and aerodynamic calculation were performed in promoting the development of next generation UAVs, with nonlinear dynamic challenges includingtransonic aeroelastic problems and high angle of attack aeroelastic problems. At present, many facets of these difficulties, together with the accompanying numerical simulation studies, remain under-explored. In addition, wind tunnel experiments face significant challenges in the dynamic morphing process. Finally, dynamic unsteady aerodynamic characteristics in the continuous morphing process still need to be verified by more related experiments.