Preliminary design of an adaptive aileron for next generation regional aircraft

Design of morphing wings at increasing TRL is common to several research programs worl-
dwide. They are focused on the improvement of their performance that can be expressed
in several ways, indeed: aerodynamic efficiency optimization, fuel consumption reduction,
COx and NOx emission reduction and so on, or targeted to overcome the classical draw-
backs related to the introduction of a novel technology such as system complexity increase
and management of certification aspects. The Consortium for Research and Innovation in
Aerospace in Quebec (CRIAQ) lunched project MD0505 that can be inserted in this crow-
ded frame. The target of this cooperation, involving Canadian and Italian academies and
a research centre, is the development of a camber “morphing aileron” integrated on an in-
novative full scale wing tip of the next generation regional aircraft. This paper focuses on
the preliminary design and the numerical modeling of its architecture. The structural layout
is, at the beginning, described in detail and furthermore, a finite element (FE) model of
the entire aileron architecture is assessed and used to verify the structural integrity under
prescribed operational conditions.