Swansea in the United Kingdom was the location elected by TEKEVER ASDS to coordinate the technical meeting of the FP7 Aeronautics research project CHANGE (www.fp7-change.eu), dedicated to a combined morphing assessment software using flight envelope data and mission based morphing prototype wing development. At this meeting, very fruitful ideas were exchanged by the CHANGE Consortium regarding the flight envelopes and desired wing shapes required for the morphing solutions development work.
Morphing in aircrafts has been studied and used throughout recent time in order to increase their flight envelope. This characteristic is of the upmost importance in order to offer a greater efficiency, versatility and performance during the assigned mission. Moreover, an aircraft with the capability to adapt itself to each given situation is prone to achieve positive results to a range of different missions instead of requiring a specific aircraft to conduct one specific mission. The main objective of the CHANGE project is to study and develop a novel morphing system which integrates up to four different morphing mechanisms into in a single wing and to demonstrate this new ability in flight. This system would take advantage of all the performance improvements achieved by adopting its wing shape according to the mission requirements of each flight phase.
Consequently, CHANGE envisions to mitigate the required energy (and thus fuel consumption) to maintain the aircraft's flight and to perform the necessary flight manoeuvres by offering the capacity to mould the exterior of the aircraft in order to enhance the necessary aspect of flight so as to lessen the required energy, such as lift over drag ratio, efficiency in aerodynamic control, lower stall velocity or to change to a better platform to perform a required manoeuver.
In order to prepare the basis for an eventual cognitive morphing on-board controller, it is necessary for the CHANGE Consortium, led by TEKEVER ASDS, to develop software that is capable of rendering the most efficient morphed wing based on the information of the current phase. This software would therefore, be able to conduct an assessment of the introduced flight conditions of the wing and display the accordant morphed wing (using a database with all current morphing systems) capable to fly with the highest performance.
