Design, Manufacturing and Wind Tunnel Validation of a Morphing Compliant Wing

This paper describes the activities performed at Politecnico di Milano within the FP7–NOVEMOR Project framework for the design, manufacturing, and wind tunnel test of a wing model equipped with morphing leading and trailing edges based on compliant structures. Starting from the reference aircraft, that is, a typical regional aircraft developed during the NOVEMOR project, a small-scale wind tunnel wing model is developed to validate the proposed morphing concept and to correlate the numerical models in an experimental environment. Special attention is devoted to the selection of the manufacturing technology due to the difficulty in realizing compliant structures with sufficient accuracy at a small-scale level. After a brief summary of the tools developed for the design of variable camber morphing wings, the paper describes in detail the design and manufacturing phases along with the functionality and wind tunnel tests. The results are used to validate the procedure adopted for the synthesis of the compliant structures and to evaluate the aerodynamic performances of the morphing wing.