Camber Controlled Airfoil Design for Morphing UAV

Morphing technology, inspired by bat and bird flight, can enable an aircraft to adapt its shape to best suit the flight condition thereby enhancing mission performance. In this paper, we propose a camber change for the morphing of airfoils with the aim of improving aerodynamic efficiency. The Global Hawk UAV mission in general and its LRN1015 airfoil in particular is in focus due to the relative long mission times spent at the two different flight conditions, namely high-speed dash and low speed loiter. Specifically, we are in search of the basic relationships between flap deflection and airfoil morphing based on a camber change. We are using several tools to virtually simulate a morphing wing including XFOIL to perform fast and relatively accurate two-dimensional steady-flow simulations of different morphed configurations using a camber controlled morphed wing to maneuver. Results show that for the LRN1015 airfoil, we can achieve the lift differential required to perform a maneuver while maintaining higher efficiency than an aircraft using flaps to perform the same maneuver.