Adaptive/Smart Structures and Multifunctional Materials 2016
A special issue of Aerospace (ISSN 2226-4310).
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 September 2016) | Viewed by 73289
Special Issue Editor
Interests: VTOL aircraft; morphing wings; aircraft/UAV design; flight loads and aeroelasticity; flight dynamics and control; adaptive structures and flexible materials
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Recent advances in smart structures and multifunctional materials have facilitated many novel aerospace technologies such as morphing aircraft. A morphing aircraft, bio-inspired by natural fliers, has gained a lot of interest as a potential technology to meet the ambitious goals of the Advisory Council for Aeronautics Research in Europe (ACARE) Vision 2020 and the FlightPath 2050 documents. A morphing aircraft continuously adjusts its wing geometry to enhance flight performance, control authority, and multi-mission capability.
In the last 30 years, there have been a number of international research programmes and projects on morphing wings. Many of these programmes are still active, especially in Europe. These programmes/projects have developed many adaptive/smart structures to allow large and small shape changes and they have investigated multifunctional materials to act as actuators and/or sensors. Furthermore, adaptive structures and multifunctional materials have been used to design compliant skins which are one of the main challenges of morphing wings. These skins have to be flexible in the morphing direction but rigid in other directions to maintain the aerodynamic shape of the wing and withstand the aerodynamic loads. The other main challenge facing morphing aircraft is the ability to design light weight, stiff, and robust adaptive structures that require minimal actuation power.
The use of adaptive/smart structures and multifunctional materials is not limited to morphing aircraft but has been used extensively in other fields, such as structural health monitoring, energy harvesting, suspension systems, wind-turbine blades, race cars, and many others. Therefore, we invite papers either addressing the research opportunities outlined here, or in the general topic area of adaptive/smart structures and multifunctional materials that will make a substantive contribution to the state of the art.
Dr. Rafic Ajaj
Guest Editor
Manuscript Submission Information
Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.
Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Aerospace is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.
Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.
Keywords
- adaptive structures
- multifunctional materials
- morphing aircraft
- actuators
- sensors
- energy harvesting
- structural health monitoring
- suspension systems
- wind-turbine blades
- compliant skins
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