Efficiency Change of Control Surface of a Biomimetic Wing Morphing UAV

Abstract

Variation modes of avian wings offer large-scale morphing aircraft an effective approach for solving problems such as the mass center shift in longitudinal trim and control system design during the morphing process. In this paper, a numerical method is established for fully understanding the influence of combined morphing on roll efficiency of a biomimetic wing unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) from the perspective of aerodynamic change, system convergence time and aerodynamic energy consumption. Analysis and simulation results show that the biomimetic wing provides effective measures to improve the mission execution efficiency of UAV. System oscillation can obviously be reduced with asymmetric sweep angle change as the supervisory control surface for pure roll maneuver, and actuators require higher output power than that with the single deflection of the flexible trailing edge (Flex-TE). In addition, for aircraft design, a larger mass ratio of the inner wing is beneficial to enhance system stability. Energy consumption of wing and Flex-TE show laws of first increasing and then decreasing along the spanwise direction during the morphing process. For actuators of the Flex-TE, the output power of units 1 to 15 should higher than other spanwise units. For the sweep angle generalized control surface, the maximum value of energy consumption per unit time is located near the 20-th spanwise unit.