Design, Manufacturing and Wind Tunnel Test of a Morphing Wing Based on Compliant Structures

The paper describes the activities performed at Politecnico di Milano in the framework of FP7-NOVEMOR Project aiming at the design, manufacturing and wind tunnel test of a wing model equipped morphing leading and trailing edges based on compliant structures. Starting from the Reference Aircraft, i.e. a typical regional aircraft developed during NOVEMOR project, a small scale wind tunnel model has been derived to validate in an experimental environment the proposed morphing concept and to correlate the numerical models. A special attention has been devoted to the selection of the manufacturing technology due to the difficulty in realizing compliant structures with enough accuracy at a small scale level. After a short reminder of the tools developed for the design of variable camber morphing wings, the paper describes in details the design and manufacturing phases together with the functionality and wind tunnel results.