The purpose of this paper is to discuss the future of adaptive structures leading towards the concept of a fully morphing aircraft configuration. First, examples are shown to illustrate the potential system-level mission benefits of morphing wing geometry. The challenges of design integration are discussed along with the question of how to address the optimisation of such a system. This leads to a suggestion that non-traditional methods need to be developed. It is suggested that an integrated approach to defining the work to be done and the energy to be used is the solution. This approach is introduced and then some challenges are examined in more detail. First, concepts of mechanisation are discussed as ways to achieve optimum geometries. Then there are discussions of non-linearities that could be important. Finally, the flight control design challenge is considered in terms of the rate of change of the morphing geometry. The paper concludes with recommendations for future work.

The stability of a smooth circular cylinder, free to translate horizontally and vertically against linear springs in the wake from an identical neighbouring cylinder, is studied using quasi-static aerodynamic derivatives and simple flutter theory. It is found that at spacing values between ten and twenty cylinder diameters (typical of the spacings employed on “bundled” overhead transmission lines) classical flutter of the leeward cylinder can occur in a certain critical range of wind speeds at certain orientations of this cylinder in the wake. However, the occurrence of flutter appears to be conditional on a positive difference of natural frequency between vertical and horizontal motions of the leeward cylinder in still air.

Classical static instability (divergence) of the leeward cylinder is also shown to be possible over the entire “incidence” range in the wake, but this occurs in a much higher wind speed range than that associated with flutter.

An energy approach has been used to obtain approximations to the natural frequencies of uniform beams when the effects of shear flexibility and rotatory inertia are included. The characteristic functions of simple beams are used to describe the bending deflection and the necessity for an assumed shear deflection shape has been eliminated by the use of simple relationships which exist between the effects of shear flexibility and rotatory inertia. A comparison of the approximate frequencies with the exact frequencies shows good agreement even at the higher frequencies. The method has been applied to hinged-hinged, fixed-free, free-free, fixed-fixed, fixed-hinged and free-hinged beams.

In a recent paper, a theory explaining the wake-induced flutter of smooth circular cylinders was developed and vindicated. It was shown that, for moderate spacing of the cylinders (where the aerodynamic coupling between the constituent motions is small), flutter could occur only when the natural frequency, in still air, of vertical oscillations exceeded that of the horizontal motions. The theory, however, took no account of the possibility of mechanical coupling between the constituent motions and, while the results from this theory were corroborated by wind-tunnel tests in which a statically uncoupled mechanical support system was used, no indications were given of the changes in aeroelastic behaviour which might accompany the introduction of simple coupling terms.

In this paper, the class of cases wherein the mechanical support system for the leeward cylinder exhibits static coupling is studied using “undamped flutter theory”. It is demonstrated that the appearance of static coupling terms can lead to quite dramatic changes in the flutter characteristics, and that considerable care must be exercised in the design and operation of wind-tunnel dynamic models if meaningful results are to be obtained.

An Appendix deals with the general problem of mechanical coupling, using the normal coordinates approach, and aspects of the problem which bear on the subconductor oscillation phenomenon experienced on “bundled” overhead power transmission lines are highlighted.

A model of the boundary layer transition process at an infinite swept attachment line under incompressible flow conditions and in the presence of a gross upstream disturbance is developed. The approach adopted is based upon the spot concepts of Emmons which are well established for transition on a flat plate. An extension to compressible flow situations is made by means of a simple transformation which reduces the process to an equivalent incompressible form. A new criterion for predicting the onset of attachment-line transition is proposed.

The process of designing the Boeing 777 high lift system is described. Particular attention is given to design constraints and examples are given of the trade studies completed. The theoretical design tools and experimental test program are described. A survey of the high lift elements is presented and flight test results are compared with predictions.

Human factors certification criteria are being developed for large civil aircraft with the objective of reducing the incidence of design-induced error on the flight deck. Many formal error identification techniques currently exist which have been developed in non-aviation contexts but none have been validated for use to this end. This paper describes a new human error identification technique (HET – human error template) designed specifically as a diagnostic tool for the identification of design-induced error on the flight deck. HET is benchmarked against three existing techniques (SHERPA – systematic human error reduction and prediction approach; human error HAZOP – hazard and operability study; and HEIST – human error In systems tool). HET outperforms all three existing techniques in a validation study comparing predicted errors to actual errors reported during an approach and landing task in a modern, highly automated commercial aircraft. It is concluded that HET should provide a useful tool as a adjunct to the proposed human factors certification process.

The historical trends of reduction in fuel consumption and emissions from aero engines have been mainly due to the improvement in the thermal efficiency, propulsive efficiency and combustion technology. The engine Overall Pressure Ratio (OPR) and Turbine Inlet Temperature (TIT) are being increased in the pursuit of increasing the engine thermal efficiency. However, this has an adverse effect on engine NOx emission. The current paper investigates a possible solution to overcome this problem for future generation Very High Bypass Ratio (VHBR)/Ultra High Bypass Ratio (UHBR) aero-engines in the form of an Inter-stage Turbine Burner (ITB). The ITB concept is investigated on a next generation baseline VHBR aero engine to evaluate its effect on the engine performance and emission characteristics for different ITB energy fractions. It is found that the ITB can reduce the bleed air required for cooling the HPT substantially (around 80%) and also reduce the NOx emission significantly (>30%) without penalising the engine specific fuel consumption.

The impingement region produced by directing a uniform, axisymmetric, supersonic jet of air normally onto a large, flat plate has been investigated experimentally and theoretically for four jets in the Mach number range 1·64 to 2·77. A qualitative theoretical description of the flow in the neighbourhood of the sonic line is given. A single-strip version of the method of Polynomial Approximation and Integral Relations (PIR) is applied to the flow, using two alternative methods of determining the centre-line shock height. The PIR predictions are compared to experimental shock shapes and pressure distributions. It is found that a PIR method in which the sonic line is assumed to intersect the shock at the jet edge leads to very good agreement with experiment at the higher jet Mach numbers, but accuracy is much reduced at the lower Mach numbers, the shock height being in error by about 62 per cent at a jet Mach number of 1·64. A change in flow pattern at small nozzle-to-plate distances is reported.

A powerful mechanism for the generation of secondary flow, which does not rely on viscous or turbulent stress, is lateral skewing of a shear layer such as that encountered by the body boundary layer in a wing/body junction. For a given entry shear, the characteristics of the secondary flow (a horse-shoe vortex) will depend on the wing nose shape. The effects of three wing nose shapes on the size, position and strength of the horse-shoe vortex have been studied in low-speed flow. As expected, the vortex size and strength increased with nose bluntness; quantitative data describing this effect are presented in this paper. The results include contours of streamwise velocity and secondary velocity plots from which vorticity contours and a non-dimensional circulation were derived. The results should be of use in wing design where this secondary flow needs to be controlled.

This paper presents a numerical method, derived directly from the basic differential equations of motion and expressed in the form of recurrence-matrix of finite differences, that can be generally applied to all multi-degree-of-freedom structures subjected to dynamic forces or forced displacements on any masses at any instants of time. The movements of the system may be described by any form of generalised co-ordinates.

A reduced-order modelling (ROM) approach for predicting steady, turbulent aerodynamic flows based on computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) is presented. Model-order reduction is achieved by parameter space sampling, solution space representation via POD and restriction of a CFD solver to the POD subspace. Solving the governing equations of fluid dynamics is replaced by solving a non-linear least-squares optimisation problem. The method will be referred to as LSQ-ROM method. Two approaches of extracting POD basis information from CFD snapshot data are discussed: POD of the full state vector (global POD) and POD of each of the partial states separately (variable-by-variable POD). The method at hand is demonstrated for a 2D aerofoil (NACA 64A010) as well as for a complete industrial aircraft configuration (NASA Common Research Model) in the transonic flow regime by computing ROMs of the compressible Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes equations, pursuing both the global and the variable-by-variable POD approach. The LSQ-ROM approach is tried for extrapolatory flow conditions. Results are juxtaposed with those obtained by POD-based extrapolation using Kriging and the radial basis functions spline method. As a reference, the full-order CFD solutions are considered. For the industrial aircraft configuration, the cost of computing the reduced-order solution is shown to be two orders of magnitude lower than that of computing the reference CFD solution.

Wind tunnel measurements have been made of the attachment-line boundary layer on a swept wing. The combination of a 4-5 in (114 mm) nose radius and 60° angle of sweep enabled a wide range of values of the parameter V2/(v dU/dx) (denoted here by C*), to be covered, and gave a thick enough boundary layer for the velocity profiles to be accurately measured. Pitot traverses were performed for values of C* from 0·59 × 105 to 3·7 × 105. Without a trip wire fitted the attachment-line flow was laminar over the full range and the measured velocity profiles agreed closely with the theory for an infinite swept wing. With a large trip wire fitted, a transition régime was observed in the range 0·6 × 105 < C* < 1·4 × 105, and at higher values of C* the flow was fully turbulent and showed good agreement with the earlier calculations of Cumpsty and Head. Preston tubes were used for skin friction measurements in fully turbulent conditions and a hot wire was used to explore the development of turbulence in the transition régime.

The main objective of the paper is to evaluate the potential of reducing the environmental impact of civil subsonic aviation by using hydrogen fuel. The paper is divided into three parts of which this is Part I, where the background, prospects and Challenges of introducing an alternative fuel in aviation are outlined. In Part II the aero engine design when using hydrogen is covered, and in Part III the subjects of optimum cruising altitude and airport implications of introducing liquid hydrogen-fuelled aircraft are raised.

Looking at the prospect of alternative fuels, synthetic kerosene produced from biomass turns out to be feasible and offers environmental benefits in the short run, whereas hydrogen seems to be the more attractive alternative in the long run.

Powering aero engines and aircraft with hydrogen has been done successfully on a number of occasions in the past. Realising this technology change for a fleet of aircraft poses formidable challenges regarding technical development, energy requirement for producing hydrogen, handling, aircraft design and making liquid hydrogen economically compatible with kerosene.

The reduction in stress concentration factors resulting from the introduction of an interference-fit pin in a circular hole in a flat plate to which a simple tension is applied has already been recorded. The same result is found to occur to an equally marked extent, and qualitatively in a very similar way, when the load is applied to the pin itself. When varying loads are applied to the pin or the plate, the effect of the interference is to produce a rise in the mean stress level at critical points on the hole boundary with a marked fall in the oscillatory stress. There appears to be an optimum value for the “interference stress” for given applied loading conditions at which the endurance of the plate will have its highest value.

When loads are applied simultaneously to pin and plate the critical stress on the hole boundary is found to be the mean of the stresses which would be produced by the total load applied separately to the pin and to the plate.

High-speed aircraft often develop separation-induced leading-edge vortices and vortex flow aerodynamics. In this paper, the discovery of separation-induced vortex flows and the development of methods to predict these flows for wing aerodynamics are reviewed. Much of the content for this article was presented at the 2017 Lanchester Lecture and the content was selected with a view towards Lanchester’s approach to research and development.

Base cavities (hollow extensions mounted behind the rear end of a bluff body) are known to reduce substantially the aerodynamic drag of two-dimensional bodies. For axisymmetric bodies their effect is not well established, and the objective of this work was to assess their drag-reducing potential. Experiments were performed using three different types of base cavities, one solid walled and two ventilated, each with six different depths ranging from 0.1 to 0.9 body diameters. All three types of cavities reduced the body drag for small cavity depths, with a maximum drag coefficient reduction of 0.027 being obtained with a ventilated cavity 0.2 diameters deep. The reductions are an order of magnitude lower than those reported for two-dimensional bodies, but are achieved with a much shorter cavity depth. Although the ventilated cavities had a beneficial effect for small depths, at large depths (greater than 0.5 diameters) they had an opposite effect – a very large drag increase. The cause of this increase is as yet not understood. Hot-wire investigation revealed that base cavities suppress wake periodicity. For cavities of small depth this correlated with a reduction in drag, but for large cavity depths the trends of the intensity of the periodic motion and of drag were not always the same.

In the coming century, the impact of air travel on the environment will become an increasingly powerful influence on aircraft design. Unless the impact per passenger kilometre can be reduced substantially relative to today’s levels, environmental factors will increasingly limit the expansion of air travel and the social benefits that it brings. The three main impacts are noise, air pollution around airports and changes to atmospheric composition and climate as a result of aircraft emissions at altitude. The lecture will review the work done within the Air Travel – greener by Design programme to assess the technological, design and operational possibilities for reducing these impacts. The main aeronautical disciplines all have something to contribute but it is in aerodynamics that the greatest opportunities appear to lie. If these opportunities are pursued, the aircraft in production in 2050 could be very different from those of 2005. It is for the aerodynamicists, supported by the structures and systems engineers and the materials scientists, to make the case for a radical leap.

An appropriate introduction to the topic of this lecture is the following comment taken from Cierva's third and last lecture presented before this Society in 1935:

“Perhaps the most irritating of the secondary difficulties met with in the Autogiro development have been those of a dynamical nature. The dissymmetry of speed on both sides of the rotor produces periodical variations in the lift and drag…“

The Fourth Cierva Memorial Lecture, which it is my privilege to present, is concerned with these periodic variations and their contribution to what remains one of the most irritating problems in rotary wing design.

The development of adaptive morphing wings has been individuated as one of the crucial topics in the greening of the next generation air transport. Research programs are currently running worldwide to exploit the potentiality of morphing concepts in the optimisation of aircraft efficiency and in the consequent reduction of fuel burn. Among these, SARISTU represents the largest European funded research project which ambitiously addresses the challenges posed by the physical integration of smart concepts in real aircraft structures; for the first time ever, SARISTU will experimentally demonstrate the structural feasibility of individual morphing concepts concerning the leading edge, the trailing edge and the winglet on a full-size outer wing belonging to a CS-25 category aircraft. In such framework, the authors intensively worked on the definition of aeroelastically stable configurations for a morphing wing trailing edge driven by conventional electromechanical actuators. Trade off aeroelastic analyses were performed in compliance with CS-25 airworthiness requirements (paragraph 25.629, parts (a) and (b)-(1)) in order to define safety ranges for trailing-edge inertial and stiffness distributions as well as for its control harmonics. Rational approaches were implemented in order to simulate the effects induced by variations of trailing-edge actuators’ stiffness on the aeroelastic behaviour of the wing also in correspondence of different dynamic properties of the trailing-edge component. Reliable aeroelastic models and advanced computational strategies were properly implemented to enable fast flutter analyses covering several configuration cases in terms of structural system parameters. Already available finite elements models were processed in MSC-NASTRAN® environment to evaluate stiffness and inertial distributions suitable for the stick-equivalent idealisation of the reference structure. A parametric stick-equivalent model of the reference structure was then generated in SANDY3.0, an in-house developed code, that was used for the definition of the coupled aero-structural model as well as for the solution of aeroelastic stability equations by means of theoretical modes association in frequency domain.

Obtained results were finally arranged in stability carpet plots efficiently conceived to provide guidelines for the preliminary design of the morphing trailing-edge structure and therein embedded actuators.