Longer wings for more fuel-efficient and environmentally friendly aircraft – enabling future high aspect ratio wing designs

Professor Jonathan Cooper, President of the Royal Aeronautical Society spoke in Dubai to talk about how he thinks the future of aircraft design would look like.

There is a strong drive world-wide to develop improved aircraft designs that are more fuel-efficient and environmentally friendly. The laws of physics tell us that there are only three ways to achieve this aim: better engines, lighter structures and improved aerodynamics, and these have defined the incremental improvements of commercial jet aircraft for the past 30+ years but the rate of improvement is slowing down.

Arguably , there is a need to change the overall aircraft configuration to make a step-change in performance and a number of different concepts have been suggested. One strong contender is high aspect ratio wing (HARW) designs; making the wings longer reduces the aerodynamic drag, however, there are difficulties relating to increased wing loads and the size of airport gates.

This presentation overviews recent research at the University of Bristol showing the benefits of highly flexible HARW designs and how these might be implemented including: modelling of highly flexible wings in-flight, optimal design of HARW configurations and the development of technologies to enable them. The talk will be illustrated with videos of wind tunnel testing of highly flexible wing models and the use of folding-wingtips for loads control.

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