[ad_1]
A team from NASA and MIT has created a new type of aircraft wing, which could make air travel much more efficient.
In an article published in the journal Smart materials and structures On Monday, the researchers described how they had built an airplane wing from hundreds of identical, light, cube-like structures, all bolted together, and then covered with a thin polymer material.
The design allows the wing to automatically change shape by adapting to the optimum configuration for the current flight phase, a configuration for takeoff, for example, and another for landing. .
Bigger and better
According to MIT News, the wing that the researchers created and tested for the new paper was about the same size as that of a single-seat aircraft, but they had already demonstrated the feasibility of their design with one wing smaller a few years ago. .
Not only does this new wing show that the concept fits a size that can carry a person, but it also illustrates a new manufacturing process that reduces the time required to manufacture each individual structure from minutes to just 17 seconds.
"Research looks promising to reduce costs and increase the performance of large, lightweight, rigid structures," research researcher Aurora Flight Sciences researcher Daniel Campbell, who was not involved in the research, told MIT News.
"The most promising applications in the short term are the structural applications of airships and space structures, such as antennas."
This article was originally published by Futurism. Read the original article.
[ad_2]
Source link