Application of a Morphing Wing Technology on Hydra Technologies Unmanned Aerial System UAS-S4

The paper describes the application of a morphing wing technology on the wing of an Unmanned Aerial System (UAS). The morphing wing concept works by replacing a part of the rigid wing upper and lower surfaces with a flexible skin whose shape can be dynamically changed using an actuation system placed inside the wing structure. The aerodynamic coefficients are determined using the fast and robust XFOIL panel/boundary-layer codes, as the optimal displacements are calculated using an original, in-house optimisation tool, based on a coupling between the relatively new Artificial Bee Colony Algorithm, and the classical, gradient-based Broyden-Fletcher-Goldfarb-Shanno (BFGS) method. All the results obtained by the in-house optimisation tool have been validated using robust, commercially available optimization codes. Three different optimization scenarios were performed and promising results have been obtained for each. The numerical results have shown substantial aerodynamic performance increases obtained for different flight conditions, using the proposed morphing wing concept.