MAGMA, a concept UAV from the University of Manchester and BAE Systems, flies using a
blown-air system, doing away with the need for mechanical flaps
By BONNIE CHRISTIAN
Thursday 14 December 2017
The MAGMA – a small scale unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), which will use a unique blown-air system to manoeuvre the aircraft - paving the way for future stealthier aircraft designs.
BAE Systems
Despite what some may claim, military aircraft aren’t invisible. But, two engineering students from the University of Manchester are developing a control system to bring this a step closer to reality.
Will Harley and Alex Bennetts are trying to solve an age old aerospace problem – how to control an aircraft without using flaps. Currently, they are used on the tails and wings of aircraft to slow down or steer a jet. But, they require a lot of maintenance, they’re big and chunky, and particularly relevant for military aircraft – visible. This plane is a little different – it can be maneuvered by changing how air flows around the plane, doing away with the need for unwieldily flaps.
Bill Crowther, a senior academic and leader of the project, says what is being tested in the lab is essentially what people have been able to do for about 60 years but now, instead of chopping up the wing to make it work, they have changed the way the air flows around it.
The first phase of flight trials, which has been coordinated alongside a team from BAE Systems, have been completed at the university using MAGMA – a small scale unmanned aerial vehicle – which uses a one-of-a-kind blown-air system to manoeuvre the aircraft. “What we’ve changed now is that we can make these controls with a much higher power density so we can get supersonic air coming out of these controls,” Crowther says. “It’s very small slots in the trailing edge of a wing and from a distance the wing doesn’t look any different but it's got these supersonic controls that allow it to have the same effect as having these big flaps that move up and down.”
This is one of the techniques the MAGMA is trialling, known as wing circulation control, which takes air from the aircraft engine and blows it supersonically through the trailing edge of the wing to provide control for the aircraft. The other technology being tested is fluidic thrust vectoring, which uses blown-air to deflect the exhaust, allowing for the direction of the aircraft to be changed. “Because these things have jet engines, rather than controlling the air around the aircraft you can actually control the air coming out the back of the engine as well,” says Crowther. “By changing the conditions of the jet exhaust we can get the jet to vector down and up and basically steer the propulsive jet from the aircraft.”
A thicker, flawless design will help military jets be stealthier, easier to fly, and all with an advanced control system
BAE Systems
Highly agile military aircraft have mechanical nozzles that can steer the jet, but those have a number of issues says Crowther, including being fairly heavy. “If you can do the same things with no moving parts its a much cooler, cleaner type of control,” he says.
The other main benefit for military aircraft is that it's less visible. At the moment, the jets are designed with aerodynamics being a second choice to anything that makes it less likely to be detected by enemy aircraft. "What you find is the shapes of the aircraft are not very good at flying but they are flying with these these advanced control concepts,” says Crowther. What his team are developing is an aircraft that is better at flying as well as with advanced control systems and low observability. “Ideally you just want this thick shape that's designed not to reflect any radar waves at any frequency and you don't want to be seen with bits sticking out,” he says.
The next stage of testing the MAGMA aircraft, which is four metres long, weighs 50 kilograms and has a top speed of just 100 miles per hour, is getting the controls to aviation industry standard - high durability and high reliability. But there’s also other considerations like heat - the control valves have to handle air that’s about two or three hundred degrees celsius - as well as being incredibly light.
The MAGMA plane at the moment is flown by a pilot on a ground, like a model airplane. “We have to make the fluidic controls behave in a simple way that a pilot doesn't notice that he's using these different controls so to him it would just feel like a conventional elevators and rudders to fly the plane.”
The team will then show whether the controls can work at the speeds expected on military jets – three of four hundred miles per hour or 80 per cent the speed of sound. “We’re moving up the size scale, but more importantly we’re moving up the speed scale to demonstrate these can work on higher speed aircraft too.”
If tests are successful the technology could allow military aircraft of the future to be lighter, stealthier, faster and more efficient military and civil aircraft. "It's like a big model aircraft but its built like a manned light aircraft," says Crowther. "There's no aircraft quite like it at the moment."
http://www.wired.co.uk/article/bae-systems-manchester-university-new-aircraft-controls-testing
