Design Optimization and Testing of Seamless Morphing Leading Edge for Large Civil Aircraft

Climate change has prompted the aviation industry to decrease its emissions of greenhouse gases. With their aerodynamic shape adaptability, morphing leading edges have great potential in the application of laminar flow wings and are beneficial to green aviation. As most of the current morphing leading edges are still in laboratory demonstrations, this paper develops a three-dimensional full-scale morphing leading edge physical prototype for a large-scale civil aircraft and demonstrates its feasibility through a ground and wind tunnel test. The final test results show that the developed morphing leading edge can be morphed into its target shape smoothly and precisely, and validate the effectiveness of the design approach.