The idea has been around for ages — since before the Wright Brothers. But, lately, the military has gotten serious about trying to build airplanes that change shape in flight. The reason? To get “aircraft that loiter for a long time and that also fly very fast,” a Darpa program manager told New Scientist in ’03. “The type of wings that you design for each of those things are different… loitering wings are generally high span and a large surface area, whereas fast wings have a low wing span and a low area. We want to generate wings that drastically change their surface area and shape, meaning more than 150 per cent change in surface area.“
Sounds cool. But pulling it off has been really tough. Some Pentagon-funded engineers are trying to design wing superstructures that slide or fold. Another group, also with Defense Department backing is aiming for an even further-out solution: materials that actually bend and twist into new shapes.
Nature has already figured out how to do this, Darpa program managers noted, with plants. A plant bends toward the light, quickly furls its leaves when touched, or pushes a concrete sidewalk aloft with its roots is essentially moving fluids between cells.
MIT professor Yet-Ming Chiang “realized that the solid compounds used to store electrical energy in lithium rechargeable batteries could be made to work in a similar way. The movement of ions to and from these materials during charging and recharging, he thought, was analogous to the moving fluids in plants,” an MIT press release notes. “Could this be a synthetic counterpart to nature’s solution?”
To find out, Chiang and Hall began testing commercially available rechargeable batteries of a prismatic form, then designed their own devices composed of graphite posts surrounded by a lithium source. The results were promising.
Among other things, they found that the batteries continued to expand and contract under tremendous stresses, a must for devices that will be changing the shape of, say, a stiff helicopter rotor that’s also exposed to aerodynamic forces…
The researchers have already demonstrated basic battery-based actuators that can pull and push with large force. Later this year, they hope to demonstrate the shape-morphing of a helicopter rotor blade. The morphing capability should allow for a more efficient design, ultimately making it possible for a vehicle to carry heavier loads.
The author Dale Brown has had the idea of morphing aerodynamic surfaces in his book series for ages. Basically, the idea is that you use hydraulic actuators (Don’t think flaps, think sections of the airframe pushing out) beneath a flexible skin to subtly change the shape of the plane.
I don’t think this will ever be integrated into a military aircraft, since it is likely for complicated structure and components that would add onto its weight, cost, also requiring delicate maintenance, making it an expensive platform. I also imagine that a high powered computer would need to be used for calculations to control the actuators components to maintain and change the frame, adding onto cost.
Although this science is a generation or two away it is very likely to become common place. Though to the extent of turning a delta wing into a large surface straight wing might not be happening tomorrow, the ability for a plane to change its wing surface to increase maneuverability, control, speed, and effiency is very likely to be implemented into some form of military aircraft within the next generation or two. I see the ability to do away with the current maneuvering surfaces such as flaps and moving more towards a wing that adjust its shape to achive this result. Think more like bird wing than mechanical.
It’s not conceptually different from a “swept wing.” But the swept wing, while elegant on the drafting table, never worked out that well in practice. There was a weight penalty; the mechanisms required a lot of maintainance and sometimes failed; the wings ended up creating more drag than anticipated when folded back; the interior of the wing was given over to the mechanism while other bombers could carry fuel there. I think Greg is right in his estimate of two generations.
Incidentally, Goodyear proposed an inflatable wing back in the sixties for vehicles reentering from space. Even built lab models. They were made out of steel-reinforced rubber. Could a combination of internal pressure and external drag be used to shape the wing? I don’t think computer power is a limiting factor, BTW. I think materials science is.
why coldn’t ya use A rolled up film external skin attached to the leading edge and the trailing edge.the conture made adjustable using styrofoam movable pannels to controll the conture of wing the rolled skin taking care of width problems phunumatics built into reienforced foam units provide all adjustments at light weight to strength ratio. Voids could be agmented with inflatable bags where needed. Hay have youall ever thought of helium filled bages insde of wings and other voids in plane to give added lift.
Now I have been working. Rappelz unwittingly with the growth of the past few years, Rappelz has been updating, I also busy, but I have not forgotten the game. Work and is inseparable from the game, I like Rappelz, even if the equipment is not good, even if I have no much rappelz gold. I also very happy, because I have many friends in the game, so what can be said, does not, as long as you said to.
Sword of the New World money: Granado Espada, boasts a number of interesting features I was dying to check out. The first is that you are in control of not one avatar, but three.
since in the large account I already had more than 1 million flyff gold, this simple idea has attracted her
I spend my pin money to bought the 2moon dil, maybe some people said that I was very foolish