Towards a bistable morphing winglet for unmanned aerial vehicle(UAV)

As missions diversify under various working environments, research on UAV has advanced to enhance flight performance and mission capability. For the purpose, necessity of a morphing wing is increased. Many researches on morphing aircraft have been studied, however, few researches focused on morphing winglet despite the aerodynamic advantage of winglet. From a functional perspective, the morphing winglet requires two major different geometries: one is a planar wing shape and the other is an upwardly bent shape. For this requirement, a bistable structure is appropriate to be utilized into the morphing winglet. In this paper, we introduce a bistable morphing winglet utilizing a metallic bistable structure and polymer. The winglet is 100mm length and 20g weight, and its cant angle is 60°.