Deformation characteristics of corrugated composites for morphing wings

Abstract

To meet the needs of morphing and withstand aerodynamic loads of a morphing wing skin, a corrugated glass fabric-epoxy laminated composite is prepared and investigated in this paper. This composite is flexible in the corrugated direction and stiff in the transverse direction to the corrugation. FEM models are established and solved to predict the characteristics of the composites by the commercial FEM software ANSYS. The relationship between the configuration of elongation and tensile load along the corrugation direction is obtained through numerical simulation. To reflect the stretching superiority of the configuration, the elongation of corrugated and flat composites is calculated and compared under the same tensile load. The linear cumulative effect of corrugated composites deformation is proved by calculating the elongation of the composites with several different corrugation numbers. Several corrugated composite specimens were manufactured and tested to verify the results of numerical analysis and the equivalent elastic modulus of the composites were also evaluated through the specimen tests. Results of simulation and experiments show that the corrugated composite provided in this paper can afford obviously larger deformation than the flat one. The corrugated composite can provide a possible choice for morphing wing skin.

Keywords

corrugated composites / deformation characteristic / numerical analysis / experiment