Design of a Sliding Morphing Skin with Segmented Rigid Panels

Presented in this paper are a sliding morphing skin and its design methodology. Instead of deforming a skin to morph with the underlying structure, a sliding skin is designed to morph using the relative sliding motion among the segmented panels. To realize this design, a design methodology is developed. It starts with discretizing the original wing skin along the airfoil to determine the number of segmented panels. Then, each segmented panel is designed as a telescopic sliding panel longitudinally, while interlayered laterally with the adjacent panels. To allow for the intended morphing motions, each panel pair is designed to connect to the inboard and outboard ribs via two separate passive linkages. To investigate the feasibility of a sliding skin, a kinematic model is provided to facilitate the establishment of the constraint equations (i.e., the conditions that these panels should meet during morphing). A search method is developed to solve the underlying problem. The proposed method is applied to simulate morphing motions, including dihedral, sweep, twist, and span. The results show that a sliding skin is kinematically feasible for these applications through a proper design. A preliminary aerodynamic analysis is presented to outline the possible flow characteristics observed on the sliding skin. At the end, this method is applied to design the morphing skin for the wing–winglet junction.