A Northeastern professor and Ph.D. student were awarded a patent for wings that fold to change shapes, offering the potential for more fuel-efficient flight.
Inspiration for innovation can come from anywhere — even origami.
Moneesh Upmanyu, a Northeastern University professor of mechanical and industrial engineering, and Raman Vaidya, one of his students who graduated from the university with a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering, were recently awarded a patent for a prototype for a structure with morphing wings inspired by the folds of origami that can change shape.
“Morphing wings can change shape on the fly,” Upmanyu said. “If you look at birds, their wings can adapt to many different shapes. Morphing wings, from that point of view, are adaptable. The idea is to have more adaptability to engineer more energy efficiency and to have flights respond to current weather conditions.”
Morphing wings are currently used in a limited capacity, primarily in experimental aircraft, military applications and unmanned aerial vehicles.
The road to invention began three to four years ago, Upmanyu said, when he became interested in how origami folding could be used in mechanical engineering.
This was a concept Vaidya had also encountered during his previous studies, having found that origami is used to inform soft robotics and aerospace structures. The two wanted to find applications for these origami-like folds in mechanical engineering and found that a morphing wing could be one area of benefit.
“Origami structures have been around for a long, long time and we just explored the engineering part of it,” Vaidya added. “They have a lot of applications in a lot of different fields. We wanted to utilize some of the surface areas that weren’t being utilized for actuation beforehand, so one of the applications that we thought of was the morphing wing.”
Vaidya said morphing wings now use a string and pulley method to change shape.
Upmanyu said they started looking at the structure of these materials to understand how principles from folding paper could apply to metal. The goal was to embed origami structures into these wings to see how much they could be folded, how flat the facets could become and how quickly they could morph.
“We were motivated by that, because some shapes, there is a limit on how much you can fold,” Upmanyu said. “But if you allow these facets to deform during folding and then make them flat, then you can achieve a new kind of compactness. We were also interested in how these folding structures can fold very fast.”
The wings Upmanyu and Vaidya designed have a hollow interior and added flexibility via a corrugated structure on the inside that allows the shape to change quickly and easily.
These types of wings can be used on aircraft and other dynamic vehicles to help control movement better and thus, save fuel, Vaidya said. Current aircraft have a cable system in their wings that allows for some flexibility. Drones don’t have these types of wings, so the models could be applied to these devices.
“This flexibility would allow more control over conditions,” Upmanyu added. “If there is a change in airflow, or there’s a change in some weather conditions, this added flexibility allows you to maneuver better.”
The patent is based on a computational model with the hopes of creating an actual prototype in the future.
“We were interested in exploring the experimental side of things, getting some empirical data and validation for our simulations,” Vaidya said. “But that’s a whole other Ph.D. … I’m hoping that we could get it to a certain stage where we can license this patent over to certain companies that might be interested in taking over the manufacture and the development part of it.”