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Purpose -This study aims to develop an innovative actuator for improving the performance of future aircraft, by adapting the airfoil shape according to the flight conditions. The flap's camber of a civil regional transportation aircraft's trailing edge actuated and morphed with the use of shape memory alloys (SMA) actuator technology, instead of the conventional split flap mechanism is studied. Design/methodology/approach -For the flap's members sizing an efficient methodology is utilised based on finite element (FE) stress analysis combined to analytically formulated design criteria. A mechanical simulation within an FE approach simulated the performance of the moving rib, integrating both aerodynamic loads and SMA phenomenology, implementing Lagouda's constitutive model. Aim of this numerical simulation is to provide guidelines for further development of the flap. A three-dimensional assembly of the flap is constructed to produce manufacturing drawing and to ensure that during its morphing no interference between the members occurrs. Eventually, the manufactured flap is integrated on a test rig and the experimental characterisations under no and static loads, and dynamic excitation are performed. Findings -Experimental results showed that the rib's SMA mechanism can adequate function under load providing satisfactory morphing capabilities. Originality/value -The investigated approach is an internal into the flap mechanism based on the shape memory effect of thin wires. In the developed mechanism, SMA wires are attached to the wing structure, where they function as actuating elements.

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The event was a special occasion to look back at the contribution of Crowncom toward the advancements of cognitive radio technology since its inaugural conference in 2006 in Mykonos, Greece, as well as to look forward to the decades ahead, the ways that cognitive radio technology would like to evolve, and the ways its emerging applications and services can ensure everyone is connected everywhere. Evolution of cognitive radio technology pertaining to 5G networks was the theme of the 2015 edition of Crowncom. The technical program of Crowncom 2015 was structured to bring academic and industrial researchers together to identify and discuss recent developments, highlight the challenging gaps, and forecast the future trends of cognitive radio technology toward its integration with the 5G network deployment. One of the key topics of the conference was cognition and self-organization in the future networks, which are now widely considered as a striking solution to cope with the future ever-increasing spectra demands. Going beyond the theoretical development and investigation, further practical advances and standardization developments in this technology could provide potential dynamic solutions to cellular traffic congestion problems by exploiting new and underutilized spectral resources. One of the challenging issues that Crowncom 2015 brought forward was to facilitate the heterogeneous demands of users in heterogeneous-type environmentsparticularly in the 5G network paradigm, where the networks are anticipated to incorporate the provision of high-quality services to users with extremely low delays and consider these requirements without explicit demand from users. Machine-type communications and Internet of Everything are now representing emerging use cases of such ubiquitous connectivity over limited spectra. Crowncom 2015 strongly advocated that the research community, practitioners, standardization bodies, and developers should collaborate on their research efforts to further align the development initiatives toward the evolution of emerging highly dynamic spectrum access frameworks. The biggest challenge is to design unified crosslayer new network architectures for successful aggregation of licensed and unlicensed spectra, addressing the spectrum scarcity problem for ubiquitous connectivity and preparing the ground for "The Age of the ZetaByte." Crowncom 2015 received a large number of submissions, and it was a challenging task to select the best and most relevant meritorious papers to reflect the theme of the 2015 edition of Crowncom. All submissions received high-quality reviews from the Technical Program Committee (TPC) members/reviewers and eventually 66 technical papers (with an acceptance ratio of 56 %) were selected for the technical program of the

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