Buckling-driven mechanisms for twisting control in adaptive composite wings
Jiayao Zhang, Chiara Bisagni
Abstract
This study aims to design novel tailorable and effective mechanisms by controlling buckling behaviour in structural elements of a composite wing for future morphing application. Instead of the traditional design against buckling, the idea is to embrace this built-in instability by using the nonlinear post-buckling response to control stiffness changes which redistribute the load in the wing structure. To enable desired multi-stable configurations, three buckling-driven mechanisms are investigated by restraining the out-of-plane buckling deformation using point, area and maximum displacement constraints. Numerical studies of the proposed mechanisms are at first conducted on a composite plate and are later integrated to control twisting of a simplified thin-walled composite wing box. The proposed mechanisms offer effective design opportunities of multi-stable configurations and demonstrate the potential to realise morphing of composite wings employing controlled buckling behaviours in structural components.