MARGIN NOTES
A Morphing Plane That Can Soar And Stretch Like A Hawk.
Birds do it. Bees do it. So do houseflies and even bats. But just how they change shape during flight has eluded aircraft designers since Orville Wright watched gulls wheel over Kitty Hawk. "I call it efficient multipoint adaptability," says Anna-Marie McGowan, manager of the Morphing Project at NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. The 90 engineers and scientists working on the project are dreaming up aircraft that morph in flight and are lighter, faster, more efficient, and safer than anything in the skies today.
Start with the skeleton. Rather than using standard aluminum and carbon graphite, McGowan is experimenting with a flexible, bonelike structure of carbon nanotubes - tiny capped cylinders of carbon molecules created under extreme heat. Some 50,000 times thinner than a human hair, carbon nanotubes are 180 to 600 times stronger than steel.
And forget wings as we know them, fixed in shape and controlled by mechanical and hydraulic flaps and ailerons. Morphing planes would have temperature-sensitive shape-memory alloys embedded with heating coils that would curl, twist, and extend, depending on conditions. Strings of small air valves called synthetic microjets would line the leading or trailing edges of the wings and change airflow by blowing or sucking. Wings would be thick and long for low-speed takeoffs and landings, then re-form to be thin, short, and swept for high-speed efficiency.
McGowan imagines the craft's skin embedded with piezoelectric material, which sends an electrical current under wind pressure and changes shape when charged. Like animal skin, it would monitor surface pressure and twitch to further change the plane's shape. "At first you'll see some of these things retrofitted on current aircraft," McGowan says. "But long term, you'll see radical changes in the way planes are built." In other words, let's do it.
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