TEMBO® Foam for Morphing Wing Applications

In recent years there has been significant interest in developing morphing air vehicles that would be able to fly efficiently over a wide range of flight regimes to meet new mission profiles. Though morphing-wing concepts have been around for many years, it has been determined that conventional designs such as swing wings are not adequate for providing the desired improvements. Many of the new morphing wing concepts that have been developed have rigid but articulating substructures that rely on flexible skins to provide the aerodynamic surface. Because of the difficult requirements, the skin is often a limiting factor in the realization of morphing concepts. Composite Technology Development, Inc. (CTD), working with the Georgia Tech Research Corporation, proposes to use a new type of shape memory polymer (SMP) for morphing wing skin elements. Key goals of the program are to define material property requirements from system-level requirements provided, to experimentally and analytically characterize the performance of the SMP, and to design and test a preliminary wing skin element.