摘要: Active wing shaping, or morphing, of an aircraft wing has the potential to substantially improve aircraft efficiency. In recent years, several studies have sought to quantify the efficiency improvements possible through active win... 展开 Active wing shaping, or morphing, of an aircraft wing has the potential to substantially improve aircraft efficiency. In recent years, several studies have sought to quantify the efficiency improvements possible through active wing shaping, but relatively few have considered how it may affect the optimum flight-path trajectory. In this paper, we seek to characterize the fuel savings from active wing shaping over an approximate optimum flight trajectory. To accomplish this, we present a simple direct trajectory optimization framework that can be used to rapidly perform a large number of trajectory optimizations to explore the design space of aircraft employing active wing shaping controls and identify how wing shaping may affect the total aircraft fuel consumption. Example solutions are presented for the approximate optimal flight-path trajectory and fuel consumption of the NASA Ikhana high-endurance UAV configuration and the NASA Common Research Model configuration. Results indicate that the use of active wing-shaping controls for load alleviation can result in up to around 8% fuel savings over an optimized baseline design operating along the optimized trajectory. It is also shown that active wing shaping tends to favor optimal trajectories with lower velocity, higher lift coefficient, and higher lift-to-drag ratio than the baseline design. 收起