Active Load Control of a Regional Aircraft Wing Equipped with Morphing Winglets

Morphing winglets are innovative aircraft devices capable to adaptively enhance aircraft lift distribution throughout the flight mission while providing augmented roll and yaw control capability. Within the scope of the Clean Sky 2 REG IADP, this paper deals with nonlinear simulations of a regional aircraft wing equipped with active morphing winglets in manoeuvring conditions. The fault tolerant morphing winglet architecture is based on two independent and asynchronous control surfaces with variable camber and differential settings capability. The mechanical system is designed to face different flight static and dynamic situations by a proper action on the movable control tabs. The potential for reducing wing and winglet loads by means of the winglet control surfaces is numerically assessed by means of static aeroelastic analyses, using a feedforward manoeuvre load alleviation controller. An electro-mechanical Matlab/Simulink model of the actuation architecture is used as design tool to preliminary evaluate the complete system performance and the ability to cope with the expected morphing aeroshapes. Then, the aeroelastic model of the aircraft is combined with the nonlinear simulator of the response of the winglet actuation system to evaluate a symmetric and asymmetric manoeuvres obtained by a sudden deflection of the main control surfaces. The use of the morphing winglet tabs shows to alleviate the wing loads in such conditions. The introduction of the dynamic actuator model leads to a reduction of the performances with respect to predictions of the static analyses but a reduction of the manoeuvre loads can still be observed.