Preliminary airfoil design of an innovative adaptive variable camber compliant wing

Abstract

In this study, an innovative adaptive variable camber compliant wing, with skin that can change thickness and tailing edge morphing mechanism that is designed based on a new kind of artificial muscles, is designed. Consisted of a compliant base plate and seamless and continuous compliant skin with the artificial muscles embedded in, this trailing edge morphing mechanism is extremely light in weight and efficient in reconfiguration of the wing sectional profile. To demonstrate the feasibility of this design, a simulative experiment of this kind of artificial muscles was designed and carried out. A demonstrative wing section with simulative driving skin mechanism and the compliant skin was manufactured. The demonstration wing section shows that the trailing edge morphing mechanism designed and simulative driving skin work good, with a –30°/+30° trailing edge morphing achieved. Targeting this innovative design, an airfoil design approach, employing CST parametric methodology, XFOIL and Multi-Objective Particle Swarm (MOPS) optimizer, is developed for the preliminary design of this innovative wing. A new selector is introduced to facilitate the searching process and improve the robustness of this method. The results show that this method is capable of designing airfoils for this special wing in a quick and effective way.