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This paper presents the design and wind tunnel testing of a morphing camber system and an estimation of performances on an unmanned aerial vehicle. The morphing camber system is a combination of two subsystems: the morphing trailing edge and the morphing leading edge. Results of the present study show that the aerodynamics effects of the two subsystems are combined, without interfering with each other on the wing. The morphing camber system acts only on the lift coefficient at a 0° angle of attack when morphing the trailing edge, and only on the stall angle when morphing the leading edge. The behavior of the aerodynamics performances from the MTE and the MLE should allow individual control of the morphing camber trailing and leading edges. The estimation of the performances of the morphing camber on an unmanned aerial vehicle indicates that the morphing of the camber allows a drag reduction. This result is due to the smaller angle of attack needed for an unmanned aerial vehicle equipped with the morphing camber system than an unmanned aerial vehicle equipped with classical aileron. In the case study, the morphing camber system was found to allow a reduction of the drag when the lift coefficient was higher than 0.48.

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This paper presents the design and wind tunnel test results of a wing including a morphing leading edge for a medium unmanned aerial vehicle with a maximum wingspan of 5 m. The design of the morphing leading edge system is part of research on the design of a morphing camber system. The concept presented here has the advantage of being simple to manufacture (wooden construction) and light for the structure of the wing (compliance mechanism). The morphing leading edge prototype demonstrates the possibility of modifying the stall angle of the wing. In addition, the modification of the stall angle is performed without affecting the slope of the lift coefficient. This prototype is designed to validate the functionality of the deformation method applied to the leading edge of the wing. The mechanism can be further optimized in terms of shape and material to obtain a greater deformation of the leading edge, and, thus, to have a higher impact on the increase of the stall angle than the first prototype of the morphing leading edge presented in this paper.

This paper describes a methodology to predict the aerodynamic behaviour of an Unmanned Aerial System. Aircraft design and flight dynamics modelling are mainly concerned with aerodynamics, and thus its estimation requires a high level of accuracy. The work presented here shows a new non-linear formulation of the classical Vortex Lattice Method and a comparison between this methodology and an experimental analysis. The new non-linear Vortex Lattice Method was performed by calculating the viscous forces from the strip theory, and the forces generated by the vortex rings from the vortex lifting law. The experimental analysis was performed on a reduced scale wing in a low speed wind tunnel. The obtained results were also compared to those obtained from semi-empirical methods programmed using DATCOM and our Fderivatives new in-house codes. The results have indicated the accuracy of the new formulation and showed that an aerodynamic model obtained with the aerodynamic coefficients predicted with this method could be useful for flight dynamics estimation.