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posted by Fnord666 on Monday April 08 2019, @12:40PM   Printer-friendly
from the flexi-wing dept.

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984

MIT and NASA engineers demonstrate a new kind of airplane wing

A team of engineers has built and tested a radically new kind of airplane wing, assembled from hundreds of tiny identical pieces. The wing can change shape to control the plane's flight, and could provide a significant boost in aircraft production, flight, and maintenance efficiency, the researchers say.

The new approach to wing construction could afford greater flexibility in the design and manufacturing of future aircraft. The new wing design was tested in a NASA wind tunnel and is described today in a paper in the journal Smart Materials and Structures, co-authored by research engineer Nicholas Cramer at NASA Ames in California; MIT alumnus Kenneth Cheung SM '07 Ph.D. '12, now at NASA Ames; Benjamin Jenett, a graduate student in MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms; and eight others.

Instead of requiring separate movable surfaces such as ailerons to control the roll and pitch of the plane, as conventional wings do, the new assembly system makes it possible to deform the whole wing, or parts of it, by incorporating a mix of stiff and flexible components in its structure. The tiny subassemblies, which are bolted together to form an open, lightweight lattice framework, are then covered with a thin layer of similar polymer material as the framework.

The result is a wing that is much lighter, and thus much more energy efficient, than those with conventional designs, whether made from metal or composites, the researchers say. Because the structure, comprising thousands of tiny triangles of matchstick-like struts, is composed mostly of empty space, it forms a mechanical "metamaterial" that combines the structural stiffness of a rubber-like polymer and the extreme lightness and low density of an aerogel.

Jenett explains that for each of the phases of a flight—takeoff and landing, cruising, maneuvering and so on—each has its own, different set of optimal wing parameters, so a conventional wing is necessarily a compromise that is not optimized for any of these, and therefore sacrifices efficiency. A wing that is constantly deformable could provide a much better approximation of the best configuration for each stage.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 09 2019, @02:04AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 09 2019, @02:04AM (#826513)

    Tetrahedral arrangements of flying surfaces are not new:

    - https://publicdomainreview.org/collections/alexander-graham-bells-tetrahedral-kites-1903-9/ [publicdomainreview.org]
    - https://books.google.com/books?id=TAUVAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA219 [google.com]
    - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrahedral_kite [wikipedia.org]

    What's new is the flexibility of the elements, which promises additional control over aeronautical characteristics.

    It's tempting to lay all of this at the feet of Buckminster Fuller but that article from the National Geographic, cited above, was probably lying on young Bucky's parents' coffee table, and he probably read it, and it probably warped his helpless little mind for the rest of his life into seeing everything as triangles.

    Smaller cells combined with a larger array result in overall greater stability. Buckminster Fuller described this phenomenon as "vector equilibrium", I think.

    Floating cities are all very interesting but I think flying cities are where it's at. Buckminster Fuller calculated that at a certain scale even reinforced concrete spheres would become buoyant, with an interior increase in temperature of just a few degrees. How much easier it would be to achieve buoyancy, and stability, and maneuverability, if one's city was a vast, kite-shaped structure? Or both?

    Food for thought.

    ~childo