AdAPTS: Adaptive Aerostructures for Power and Transportation Sustainability

Adaptive Aerostructures for Power and Transportation Sustainability (AdAPTS) is an Early Career Fellowship research project which will advance an ambitious new approach to the design of aerostructures by harnessing the adaptability of compliance-based morphing to continuously optimise aerodynamic performance. This will allow for greener and more sustainable fixed and rotary wing transportation and wind turbine power generation through reduced aerodynamic drag, increased efficiency and improved resilience to changing operating conditions.

Compliance-based adaptive aerostructures are designed to exhibit structural and material flexibility that allows them to change their shape in a smooth and continuous manner. These changes in shape are isolated to certain desired motions in specific areas of an aerodynamic surface, for example the amount of curvature at the rear of an aerofoil, to allow for targeted changes in shape while retaining overall strength. These changes in shape improve the ability of the wing or blade to produce lift, minimise the amount of drag generated, and allow for continuous adaptation to changing operating conditions. Initial work has shown that the family of compliance-based morphing devices developed by the PI can provide significant improvements in performance of 5-25%.

While the potential benefits are promising, much work remains to make compliance-based morphing a viable solution. These types of structures are poorly understood, and the underlying technologies need significant development. The poor understanding of the performance and behaviour of these structures is due to their compliant nature, which means that the structural, aerodynamic, and actuation characteristics are all highly coupled - with the aerodynamic loading affecting the actuated shape, which in turn affects the aerodynamics. This coupling requires simulation of all of the physics involved in a cohesive, coupled manner. Furthermore, the structural, material, and actuation technologies used to achieve these smooth and continuous deformed shapes are novel, and therefore significant effort is needed to mature them to the point where they can be used in real-world applications. Finally, industry partners in the fixed wing, rotary wing, and wind turbine fields see the potential in these technologies, but because they are so novel and different from current approaches, work needs to be done to show the specific, quantitative improvements in performance that these technologies can achieve for their applications.

To address the three sides of this problem, AdAPTS will undertake an ambitious research programme with three parallel streams of work that will: 1.) create a fully comprehensive analysis framework to better understand the hierarchical, coupled performance of compliance-based morphing structures from the bottom up, 2.) rapidly mature the proposed morphing technologies, and 3.) work directly with industry to analyse and design adaptive structures for their products, and to predict the achievable improvements in performance.

AdAPTS is designed to help address the pressing societal need to develop more environmentally sustainable and resilient transportation and power generation technologies. The long-term focus of this research is therefore on creating positive impact for society through the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions and environmental impact. Achieving this goal requires strengthening our fundamental, physical understanding of compliance-based morphing systems, maturing the technologies involved, and making the case to industry to advance widescale adoption of the approach into fixed wing aircraft, helicopter, and wind turbines. This development strategy will create cascading positive impacts on the people involved.

The development of a better understanding of the coupled physics of compliance-based adaptive aerostructures will advance our knowledge of this and other complex systems, which will increase our ability to make them more efficient, creating impact within the scientific community. The maturation of relevant technologies will benefit UK industry and support the growth of related fields. The PI will work very closely with industry over the course of this project to design application specific compliance-based morphing systems, which will help show the potential benefits to industry to encourage adoption. If the technologies prove successful, then they would provide UK industry with a competitive edge in the increasingly global aerospace/wind energy markets. The creation of new knowledge and technologies is also likely to lead to spin-out companies and the creation of new markets.

AdAPTS will also have strong positive impact on the researchers directly involved. It will allow the PI, postdoctoral researchers, summer interns, undergraduate project students, and PhD students involved to develop new skills in cutting edge methods within aerospace structures engineering. It will also create a strong and cohesive research group which will feed into the pipeline of aerospace trained people available to UK industry. The wide-reaching public engagement activities that will be undertaken will further help expand this pipeline by getting young people excited about sustainable engineering and careers in STEM fields.