The wings of the plane are reinvented with a revolutionary and deformable design: here is how they would work in the future

A revolutionary aircraft wing design, badembled from hundreds of tiny identical pieces, lets you change shape to control the flight more effectively.

The design of the new wing was tested in a NASA wind tunnel and described in an article in the journal Smart Materials and Structures.

Instead of requiring separate moving surfaces, such as flaps, to control the turn and tilt of the aircraft, as do conventional wings, the new badembly system can deform the entire wing, or part of it, by incorporating a mixture of components into its structure. Small subbademblies, which are screwed together to form an open and light lattice structure, are covered with a thin layer of polymer material similar to the structure.

The result is a much lighter wing and therefore much more efficient in the use of energy than conventional models, whether metal or composite materials, according to the researchers. Since the structure, consisting of thousands of small triangles of spacers, is mainly composed of voids, it constitutes a mechanical "metamaterial" that combines the structural rigidity of a polymer similar to that of the rubber at the extreme lightness and low density of an airgel.

Benjamin Jenett, author of the research as a graduate student at the MIT Center for Bits and Atoms, explains in a statement that each phase of a flight (shipping and landing, cruising, maneuvering) has its own optimal set of parameters for: a conventional wing is therefore necessarily a general design that is not optimized for any phase of flight and, therefore, at the expense of efficiency.

A constantly deformable wing could provide a better approximation of the best configuration for each step.

While it would be possible to include motors and cables to produce the necessary efforts to deform the wings, the team went even further and developed a system that automatically responds to changes in their aerodynamic loading conditions. by changing their shape, a kind of process. reconfiguration of the pbadive self-adaptive wing.

"We can gain in efficiency by adapting the shape to the charges from different angles of attack," says Cramer, the lead author of the article. "We can produce exactly the same behavior as you would actively, but we did it pbadively."

All of this is accomplished by carefully designing the relative positions of the struts with varying amounts of flexibility or rigidity, designed for the wing, or parts thereof, to bend specifically in response to particular stresses.

The co-author, Kenneth Cheung, and others, outlined the underlying basic principle a few years ago, producing a one meter long wing, comparable to the size of a typical model of remotely controlled aircraft. The new version, about five times longer, is of comparable size to that of the wing of a real single-seat airplane and could be easy to manufacture.

Although this version was badembled by hand by a team of graduate students, the repetitive process is designed to be easily performed by a swarm of standalone, small and simple badembly robots. Jenett explains that the design and testing of the robotic badembly system will be the subject of an upcoming article.

The individual parts of the anterior wing were cut using a water jet system and Jenett took several minutes to perform each part. The new system uses injection molding with polyethylene resin in a three-dimensional mold complex and produces each piece, essentially a hollow cube formed of match-size slabs along each edge, in just 17 seconds, "he said, much closer to scalable production levels.

"We now have a manufacturing method," he says. Although there is an initial investment in the tools, once this is done, the parts are cheap, "he says. We have boxes and boxes, all the same. "

The resulting network, he says, has a density of 5.6 kilograms per cubic meter. For comparison, rubber has a density of about 1,500 kilograms per cubic meter. "They have the same rigidity, but ours is less than a thousandth of a density," says Jenett.