Drag Performance of Twist Morphing MAV Wing

Abstract

Morphing wing is one of latest evolution found on MAV wing. However, due to few design problems such as limited MAV wing size and complicated morphing mechanism, the understanding of its aerodynamic behaviour was not fully explored. In fact, the basic drag distribution induced by a morphing MAV wing is still remained unknown. Thus, present work is carried out to compare the drag performance between a twist morphing wing with membrane and rigid MAV wing design. A quasi-static aeroelastic analysis by using the Ansys-Fluid Structure Interaction (FSI) method is utilized in current works to predict the drag performance a twist morphing MAV wing design. Based on the drag pattern study, the results exhibits that the morphing wing has a partial similarities in overall drag pattern with the baseline (membrane and rigid) wing. However, based CD analysis, it shows that TM wing induced higher CD magnitude (between 25% to 82% higher) than to the baseline wing. In fact, TM wing also induced the largest CD increment (about 20% to 27%) among the wings. The visualization on vortex structure revealed that TM wing also produce larger tip vortex structure (compared to baseline wings) which presume to promote higher induce drag component and subsequently induce its higher CD performance.