Flexible honeycomb skins offer a promising route for achieving continuous shape adaptation in morphing aircraft. In practical service, however, the skin must simultaneously accommodate large in-plane deformation while maintaining sufficient out-of-plane load-bearing capacity, which poses a fundamental design challenge. To address this trade-off, this study investigates an SMA-based U-shaped honeycomb under combined tensile deformation and aerodynamic pressure. A parametric finite element model incorporating SMA superelasticity is established, and an automated Abaqus–modeFRONTIER framework is developed for multi-objective optimization under dual loading conditions. The curvature radius, parallel-segment length, and middle-beam length are selected as design variables. The optimization objectives are defined as minimizing the maximum local strain under a prescribed tensile displacement and reducing the Z-direction displacement under aerodynamic loading as an indicator of out-of-plane bending resistance. The resulting Pareto front reveals the trade-off between flexibility and load-bearing capacity, and the sensitivities of the key geometric parameters are analyzed. Compared with the initial design, a representative optimized solution reduces the maximum local strain by 58.5% and the Z-direction displacement by 61.3%. These results provide a numerical basis for the design of SMA-based flexible skins for morphing aircraft.
Niu et al. (Sat,) studied this question.
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