The current aviation sector, notably unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), is shifting from fixed-wing to morphing wing vehicles. Morphing wings are desired for fuel efficiency, better manoeuvrability, flexibility and to meet mission-specific goals. Due to recent advances in material science and the production processes, there has been a surge of interest in the development of corrugated structures. Corrugated structures offer a possible morphing wing solution because of their anisotropic stiffness properties, which are related to their geometry. This thesis proposes a double corrugated variable camber (DCVC) morphing wing configuration employing corrugated structures. A structural model using chain algorithm based on Euler–Bernoulli beam theory is proposed for the single corrugated variable camber (SCVC) and DCVC designs with small deflections. Subsequently, the structural and aerodynamic properties of SCVC and DCVC morphing concepts are compared.
Furthermore, a large deflection study, considering geometric nonlinearity, is carried out to develop morphing wings. This thesis provides an iterative technique based on a chain algorithm for large deflections of single and double corrugated structures subjected to various loading conditions. Additionally, prototypes of the single and double corrugated structures are fabricated and subjected to moment actuation experiments. The results of these tests are used to validate the deflections obtained by the proposed iterative approach and finite element models and are found to be reasonably close.