Lift performance of a twist morphing MAV wing

Abstract

The manoeuvrability performance of a twist morphing MAV has been the main interest for the past researches. However, aerodynamic behaviour of a twist morphing wing is not fully explored due to limited MAV wing size, limited energy budgets, complicated morphing mechanism, and complex aerodynamic-wing structural interaction. Therefore, the effect of a twist morphing wing mobility on the lift distribution of MAV wing is still remained unknown. Thus, present work was carried out to compare the lift performance between a twist morphing wing with membrane and rigid MAV wing design. A quasi-static aeroelastic analysis by using the Ansys-Fluid Structure Interaction (FSI) method is utilized in current works to calculate the lift performance for each MAV wing design. Each MAV wing has identical wing dimension except for twist morphing wing where a 3N morphing force was imposed on the wing to produce the twist mobility. The lift results show that twist morphing wing able to produce (5% to 20%) higher lift magnitude compared to the membrane and rigid wing for every angle attack cases at pre-stall angle. However, twist morphing wing had slightly suffered from (at least 1°) earlier stall angle and produced almost similar maximum lift coefficient magnitude to the membrane wing.