Aerodynamic-driven morphing aircraft and its aerodynamic design

Morphing technology is considered a crucial direction for the future development of aircraft. However, conventional morphing aircraft often employ complex actuation mechanisms and actuators to drive the morphing process. The associated costs in terms of structural weight increase and space occupancy are prohibitively high, even exceeding the benefit of morphing. Especially for high aspect ratio aircraft with large root bending moments, it is very difficult for actuators to directly drive wing deformation. To address this issue, aerodynamic forces generated by control surface deflection can be utilized as an alternative to actuator-driven morphing. This approach reduces the overall cost of morphing while enhancing its benefits. This novel aerodynamic-driven morphing technique imposes new requirements and challenges on the aerodynamic design of aircraft. With a combination of flight experiments and numerical simulations, this article analyzes the variations in aerodynamic forces during the aerodynamic-driven process. Using a high aspect ratio long-endurance UAV as the design baseline, the design method of the control surface for aerodynamic-driven morphing is also discussed.