Design and analysis of rigid-body shape-change mechanism for aircraft wings

Abstract

Airframe noise reduction becomes a main interest among researchers who study the performance of aircrafts. The airframe noise can occur between the high-lift systems and main body of the airfoil. The proposed shape-changing airfoil is one of many ideas to reduce airframe noise by eliminating the gap between the main body and high-lift systems. This paper presents a new design of 30P30N airfoil, which converts the three-element airfoil (slat, main body and flap) into two-element airfoil (combination of slat and main body as an element and flap) by installing a shape-changing slat into the systems. This work applies a chain of rigid bodies connected by revolute and prismatic joints that are capable of approximating a shape change defined by a set of morphed slat design profiles. To achieve a single degree of freedom (DOF), a building-block approach is employed to mechanize the fixed-end shape-changing chain with the helped of Geometric Constraint Programming technique as an effective method to develop the mechanism. The conventional and shape-change 30P30N airfoils are compared to study the performances of airfoils with the velocity and angle of attack are constant.