Preliminary design of an adaptive aileron for the next generation regional aircraft

Design of morphing wings at increasing TRL is common to several research programs worldwide. They are focused on the improvement of their performance that can be expressed in several ways, indeed: aerodynamic efficiency optimization, fuel consumption reduction, COx and NOx emission reduction and so on, or targeted to overcome the classical drawbacks related to the introduction of a novel technology such as system complexity increase and management of certification aspects. The Consortium for Research and Innovation in Aerospace in Quebec (CRIAQ) lunched project MD0505 that can be inserted in this crowded frame. The target of this cooperation, involving Canadian and Italian academies and a research centre, is the development of a camber “morphing aileron” integrated on an innovative full scale wing tip of the next generation regional aircraft. This paper focuses on the preliminary design and the numerical modeling of its architecture. The structural layout is, at the beginning, described in detail and furthermore, a finite element (FE) model of the entire aileron architecture is assessed and used to verify the structural integrity under prescribed operational conditions.