Flexible skin for in-plane shear morphing of aerospace structures

Abstract

Variable sweep aircrafts are very important both for military applications as well as for UAV vehicles to improve the fuel efficiency and adapt to the given operational constraints. To facilitate the variable sweep in an aircraft we need highly anisotropic material, which possess very less stiffness in the in-plane direction and very high stiffness in the out-of-plane direction. To achieve these peculiar characteristics in a material, a flexible material elastomer is considered as a matrix and reinforcements are placed in the matrix to achieve the required properties for the material. Based on literature square sandwich structures are found to be the optimal reinforcements and therefore, considered for the analysis. Numerical analysis is done to determine the optimum dimensions like the thickness, length and size of the cells in the sandwich structure are determined. The reinforcements with the dimensions derived earlier are considered for further experimentation. In addition to the validation of the mechanical properties of the structure, the integrity and longevity of the structure needs to be tested. In the future tests, the effect of fatigue and environmental conditions on the proposed wing skin will be analyzed.