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MADCAT Shape-Shifting Airplane Wing Unveiled by NASA and MIT

At the end of March, the Smart Materials and Structures journal published a paper signed by NASA and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) engineers that talks about a shape-shifting airplane wing. A technology that, its creators say, could revolutionize flight.
Illustration of the shape-shifting wing 5 photos
Photo: MIT News
Shape-Shifting Airplane Wing by NASA and MITShape-Shifting Airplane Wing by NASA and MITShape-Shifting Airplane Wing by NASA and MITShape-Shifting Airplane Wing by NASA and MIT
The technology is called MADCAT, short for Mission Adaptive Digital Composites Aerostructure Technology. Made of hundreds of tiny triangular components, the resulting wing is according to its creators as stiff as a rubber-like polymer and as light and low-density as an aerogel.

The pieces of material – they can be made of anything from metal to composites, but this time they used carbon fiber – have been bounded together to form a lattice framework, covered in a thin layer of polymer.

What resulted is a wing that can change its shape to control the roll or pitch of the plane, without the use of components like ailerons. The shifting of shape is not done by means of motors or cables – although, engineers say, these can be added – but by using changes in the wing’s aerodynamic load.

“We’re able to gain efficiency by matching the shape to the loads at different angles of attack,” said according to MIT News Nicholas Cramer, research engineer at NASA Ames and the paper’s lead author.

“We’re able to produce the exact same behavior you would do actively, but we did it passively.”

A hand-assembled prototype of the wing has already been tested in the NASA wind tunnel at Langley Research Center, where “it performed even a bit better than predicted.”

The wing is currently only in research stages, but if successful, the technology's scope could expand far beyond aviation and become the design of choice for wind turbines, bridges or space structures.

The paper published in the Smart Materials and Structures journal was authored by Nicholas Cramer, MIT alumnus Kenneth Cheung, and MIT graduate student Benjamin Jenett, among others.

More details about the project can be found in the video below.

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About the author: Daniel Patrascu
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Daniel loves writing (or so he claims), and he uses this skill to offer readers a "behind the scenes" look at the automotive industry. He also enjoys talking about space exploration and robots, because in his view the only way forward for humanity is away from this planet, in metal bodies.
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