The Airplane from “Legos”
The wings of the current planes are very complex. Many different parts like winglets, flaps, spoilers and many more are needed to provide all the functionality we expect on a modern plane. A new revolutionary wing may change all that very soon.
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The new wings are made from a set of small “Lego”-like cubes that create a light hollow frame that is covered by a thin layer of polymer. This results in large savings in terms of weight of the wing and that makes the plane much more effective compared to more conventional wings from metals and composites.
The key idea in making the new wing was making everything out of thousands of similar triangle-shape elements with movable joints. The creators call this “mechanical metamaterial”. To be more specific, by that they mean the fact that the majority of the space is made from emptiness. Similarly to how light materials with a low density but high durability work – like aerogels. But the difference is the fact that this structure can change its shape. Changing the shape of the wing depending on the situation allows using the ideal shape for that situation further pushing the effectivity.
If your first idea was that this will need many engines to power the movement of the individual elements, stop. You’re wrong. The engineers created their invention so it automatically reacts to changes in the aerodynamics. They are calling it the passive wing-reconfiguration process.
Projects trying to bring this or a similar idea to life aren’t anything new. But until this point, it was always remote control small scale models. This will be a working wing with a span of 5 in a wind-tunnel and everything seems to suggest that the technology has a bright future in front of itself.
Sources:
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It looks like you're just paraphrasing the source material, not offering a summary or original opinion. Decline payout if you content is not original work. You also failed to credit the image creator.
That's not ethical blogging. If you believe I am in error, please reply and I will remove my flag if you can make a reasonable case.
You messed up my feed by making this post stand out as something I should investigate. I don’t see anything wrong with it.
hey there
In my science articles I always use images from pixabay which require no attribution
https://pixabay.com/service/license/
this time it was this one in particular
https://pixabay.com/photos/plane-trip-journey-explore-841441/
And about the paraphrasing, maybe to a degree, but mostly this is just a short summary of how I understood what I read.
Un-flagged. Due to the prevalence of plagiarism here, I always advise crediting images, especially when they are CC0 or Pixabay licensed.
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