Seamless Telescopic Wing Project

& Flying Wing Project

During the second year of my undergraduate aerospace engineering degree, I felt the urge to build a new type of porable flying wing drone when exploring possible dissertation ideas. The idea behind this flying wing style UAV mainly focused on the wings of this aircraft. I came up with concept of a new type of telescopic mechanism in an attempt to find something superior to ordinary hinges. Although it proved to have potential, it was frought with complications and the design was massively overengineered. Here are a few pictures of only the first stage of the design, as the whole thing is spread across multiple documents.

Theoretical Advantages

The one major advantage of this design in my mind was the mitigation of turbulence caused by spanwise flow from the bumps of the ridges or seemliness that would normally exist in the operation of a traditional telescopic wing mechanism. My concept sought to prevent this by using an outer "skin" that would pop into position from tension upon sliding out of its place. Given that the negative space inside of its slot or hollow doesn't have enough space to hold the entire aerofoil altogether, the mechanism grows even more complex. Through the use of more plastic tension, the "skin", broken up into two halves which slide over one another, also snap into extension upon being given the freedom of space. They slide along the groove in the springs as can be seen in the photos.

The first stage when extended.

The first stage when retracted back into the main body.

The groove or notch

Here is the outer skin of the first section. It is in two sections and can squish down to about half of its size.

The problem with this mechanism arises when one is onto their third section of the wing and the then they have to figure out whether its even possible to get such a mechanism so small and exact .

This was precisely my problem. Up until the sliding parts design I was using a 3D printer to print out the skin sections, however this added a whole new layer of complexity and suddenly it appeared that the only other option was my hands.

Unfortunately, like so many other projects throughout these three years, I have had to put this on halt until graduation simply due to the sheer complexity of it and the trial and error it demands with experimentation.

Ultimately, despite the mechanism's obvious shortcomings, without even mentioning structural rigidity with 3 or more sections, I still would not deem this project a complete failure, as despite the project being uncomplete, perusing it really gave me a glimpse of the potential this design has to offer. This is exemplified by the fact that it is so unusual, that there are virtually no papers documenting such an approach to a portable aircraft wing design. Not only this, but the structural weakness mentioned earlier would not have that much of an effect on small winged drones utilising this mechanism which would probably benefit it the most as they need to be man portable anyway. All of this being said, such as concept is not worth giving up on and I shall finish it in the future.

The "T" rails can be seen running along the inside of the skin to the second section. The overhang geometry is partially what convinced me not to print this, however upon revaluation, I believe this could be done in parts.

I also experimented with adding leading edge slats to the flying wing design in CFD, which proved to be quite helpful to prevent the breakup of flow over the upper surface of the wing at high angle of attack.

Flying Wing UAV Body with LE Slats WORKING v1_ (James's Team) - Autodesk Fusion (Education License) 2024-10-15 04-05-32.mp4

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