New Concept for Aircraft Morphing Wing Skin: Design, Modeling, and Analysis

In this paper, a new concept of a gripper pin structure is proposed for an aircraft morphing wing that can decouple in-plane stiffness from out-of-plane stiffness. There has been a pressing need for morphing wing skin structures that hold both low in-plane and high out-of-plane stiffness. A design methodology for the gripper pin morphing wing skin is presented here. The torsional and bending resistance mechanisms of the wing skin are presented to demonstrate its performance. The performance of the gripper pin wing skin under the variable camber compliant wing morphing process was estimated using 3D finite element models. According to the 3D finite element analyses, the stress levels of the gripper pin skin are much lower than that of the bulk material skin. The gripper pin wing skin structure has an enormous advantage with regard to the stress level and given its low actuation energy.