Stability Evaluation of a Fixed-Wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicle with Morphing Wingtip

Abstract

Aeronautical applications of morphing technologies are continued to increase their popularity and wide spread application during last years. The technology takes place in not only military, but also civil applications that aims providing superior performances to manned or unmanned aircraft than conventional configurations. However, multidisciplinary approach is required for an aerial vehicle to have ultimate outcome from such an application due to existence of interdisciplinary interactions. Therefore, this research aims to investigate effects of morphing wingtip application on longitudinal and lateral-directional stabilities of a fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicle, which have remarkable effect on autonomous control performance considerations. In this article, morphing wingtip refers to folding the wing from a determined spanwise location with a dihedral angle. With the aim of the study, wingtips of an unmanned aerial vehicle were folded with 15, 30 and 45 degrees of dihedral angles to be compared with original non-dihedral design. Longitudinal and lateral-directional characteristics of new variations were evaluated in terms of stability derivatives by means of linearized equations of motion that were also presented in state-space representation. Aerodynamic impacts of each variation were assessed by means of computational results obtained from analyses with three-dimensional panel method. Furthermore, taking inertial changes into consideration, concluding remarks on both longitudinal and lateral-directional stability derivatives were presented for each configuration.

Keywords

• Unmanned aerial vehicle
• morphing wingtip
• aerodynamics
• stability
• autonomous control

References

1. Ahmad, M., Hussain, Z. L., Shah, S. I. A., Shams, T. A. (2021). Estimation of Stability Parameters for Wide Body Aircraft Using Computational Techniques. Applied Sciences, 11(5), 2087.
2. Ajaj, R. M. (2021). Flight Dynamics of Transport Aircraft Equipped with Flared-Hinge Folding Wingtips. Journal of Aircraft, 58(1), 98-110.
3. Beron-Rawdon, B. (1988). Dihedral, Model Aviation Magazine.
4. Cheung, R. C., Rezgui, D., Cooper, J. E., Wilson, T. (2020). Analyzing the dynamic behavior of a high aspect ratio wing incorporating a folding wingtip. In AIAA Scitech 2020 Forum (p. 2290).
5. Çelik, H., Oktay, T., Türkmen, İ. (2016). İnsansiz Küçük Bir Hava Aracinin (Zanka-I) Farkli Türbülans Ortamlarinda Model Öngörülü Kontrolü ve Gürbüzlük Testi. Havacılık ve Uzay Teknolojileri Dergisi, 9(1), 31-42.
6. Çoban, S. (2019). Simultaneous tailplane of small UAV and autopilot system design. Aircraft Engineering and Aerospace Technology.
7. Çoban, S. (2020). Autonomous performance maximization of research-based hybrid unmanned aerial vehicle. Aircraft Engineering and Aerospace Technology.
8. Deepa, S. N., Sudha, G. (2015). Modeling and approximation of STOL aircraft longitudinal aerodynamic characteristics. Journal of Aerospace Engineering, 28(2), 04014072.

9. Dussart, G., Yusuf, S., Lone, M. (2019). Identification of In-Flight Wingtip Folding Effects on the Roll Characteristics of a Flexible Aircraft. Aerospace, 6(6), 63.
10. Gudmundsson, S. (2013). General aviation aircraft design: Applied Methods and Procedures. Butterworth-Heinemann.
11. Lixin, W. A. N. G., ZHANG, N., Hailiang, L. I. U., Ting, Y. U. E. (2022). Stability characteristics and airworthiness requirements of blended wing body aircraft with podded engines. Chinese Journal of Aeronautics, 35(6), 77-86.
12. Kanat, Ö. Ö., Karatay, E., Köse, O., Oktay, T. (2019). Combined active flow and flight control systems design for morphing unmanned aerial vehicles. Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Part G: Journal of Aerospace Engineering, 233(14), 5393-5402.
13. Konar M. (2019). Redesign of morphing UAV's winglet using DS algorithm based ANFIS model. Aircraft Engineering and Aerospace Technology, 91 (9), pp. 1214-1222.
14. Konar, M., Turkmen, A., Oktay T., (2020). Improvement of the thrust-torque ratio of an unmanned helicopter by using the ABC algorithm. Aircraft Engineering and Aerospace Technology, 92 (8), 1133-1139.
15. Konar M., (2020). Simultaneous determination of maximum acceleration and endurance of morphing UAV with ABC algorithm-based model. Aircraft Engineering and Aerospace Technology, 92 (1), 579-586.
16. Kose, O., Oktay, T. (2020). Simultaneous quadrotor autopilot system and collective morphing system design. Aircraft Engineering and Aerospace Technology.
17. Kose, O., Oktay, T. (2021). Hexarotor Longitudinal Flight Control with Deep Neural Network, PID Algorithm and Morphing. European Journal of Science and Technology, (27), 115-124.
18. Nelson, R. C. (1998). Flight stability and automatic control (Vol. 2). New York: WCB/McGraw Hill.
19. Oktay, T., Konar, M., Onay, M. , Aydin, M., Mohamed, M. A. (2016). Simultaneous small UAV and autopilot system design. Aircraft Engineering and Aerospace Technology.
20. Oktay, T., Celik, H., Turkmen, I. (2018). Maximizing autonomous performance of fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicle to reduce motion blur in taken images. Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Part I: Journal of Systems and Control Engineering, 232(7), 857-868.
21. Oktay, T., Eraslan, Y. (2021). Numerical Investigation of Effects of Airspeed and Rotational Speed on Quadrotor UAV Propeller Thrust Coefficient. Journal of Aviation, 5(1), 9-15.
22. Schoser, J., Cuadrat-Grzybowski, M., Castro, S. G. (2022). Preliminary control and stability analysis of a long-range eVTOL aircraft. In AIAA SCITECH 2022 Forum (p. 1029).
23. Smith, D. D., Lowenberg, M. H., Jones, D. P., Friswell, M. I. (2014). Computational and experimental validation of the active morphing wing. Journal of aircraft, 51(3), 925-937.
24. Sofla, A. Y. N., Meguid, S. A., Tan, K. T., Yeo, W. K. (2010). Shape morphing of aircraft wing: Status and challenges. Materials & Design, 31(3), 1284-1292.
25. Şumnu, A., Güzelbey, I. H. (2021). CFD Simulations and External Shape Optimization of Missile with Wing and Tailfin Configuration to Improve Aerodynamic Performance. Journal of Applied Fluid Mechanics, 14(6), 1795-1807.
26. Yen, S. C., Fei, Y. F. (2011). Winglet dihedral effect on flow behavior and aerodynamic performance of NACA0012 wings. Journal of fluids engineering, 133(7).