Investigation of membrane actuation for roll control of a micro air vehicle

A class of micro air vehicles uses a flexible membrane wing for weight savings and passive shape adaptation. Such a wing is not amenable to conventional aileron mechanisms for roll control, due to a lack of internal wing structure. Therefore, morphing (in the form of asymmetric twisting) is implemented through the use of a torque-actuated wing structure with thousands of discrete design permutations. A static aeroelastic model of the micro air vehicle is developed and validated to optimize the performance of the torque-actuated wing structure. Objective functions include the steady-state roll rate and the lift-to-drag ratio incurred during such a maneuver. An optimized design is obtained through the use of a genetic algorithm presenting significant improvements in both performance metrics compared with the baseline design.