Virginia Tech Morphing Wing Project
The Morphing Wing Project is a joint venture in senior design between the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Deparetments at Virginia Tech. Last year's team successfully designed, fabricated and flight tested a remote controlled aircraft with a telescoping wing. We predicted that the telescoping wing would allow the aircraft to function in two modes. Retracting the wings would enable the aircraft to be quick and maneuverable, while extending the wings would provide more lift, resulting in improved fuel economy at slow speeds. These characteristics were chosen to match the stereotypical UAV mission: quickly fly out to a target, loiter and collect data, then quickly return to base. The aircraft was fully instrumented so as to provide information about the aircraft's flight characteristics (recoded data included flight speed, roll and pitch rates, accelerations and control surface deflections). Quantitative and qualitative data from flight tests proved our hypotheses to be correct.
This year's team is currently working on several projects. The first is to replace the servo motor on the BetaMax with a piezoelectric motor. Another project involves modifying the BetaMax to be capable of differential telescoping for roll control. Our final project aims to design an ultrasonic control system that would serve as an autopilot for airplanes while flying in ground effect. It was realized last summer that such a control system was needed when the team built a Morphing WIG (Wing In Ground effect) but was unable to remotely fly in ground effect.
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
Mechanical Engineering Dpeartment
Copyright 2001-2004 Virginia Tech Morphing Wing Group