The European Commision has issued recently regulations ordering the necessity of the 40% reduction of polluting emissions and of the greenhouse gases produced by vehicles. This target is to be achieved by 2030. It is an ambitious goal asking car industry to develop technological solutions in order to allow a consumption reduction, an overall efficiency increase and a vehicles wider sustainability. In this context, aerodynamics has a huge impact on drag resistance and vehicle range. For this reasons, the aim of this paper is a feasibility analysis on the design of an active wing (also called morphing wing) actuated by a piezoelectric system to evaluate a future automotive application, that include racing and urban vehicles.Active aerodynamics &nbsp;have a significant influence on drag reduction in terms of wake generation and performance enhancement, because it is able to adapt the wing configuration to different driving conditions such as curve, straight line and braking. In particular, the shape morphing allows a continuous variation of the air foil in order to be suitable to the different vehicle working condition. The novelty of this concept consists in a lightweight technology adopted to actuate the wing without using heavy traditional electric or hydraulic systems: the piezoelectric patch can be integrated inside the component during the manufacturing process especially for wing made of composite materials.&nbsp;By doing so, some disadvantages are avoided such as excessive packaging volume, mass addition and maintenance requirement. Firstly, a preliminary study has been conducted to find the most appropriate automotive air foil to guarantee the best trade-off between aerodynamic efficiency and load. Secondly, a test bench has been set to evaluate the behaviour of the first prototype (with chord and depth 1:110 scaled from the original air foil) to different electric input in order to carry out the corresponding displacement on the trailing edge.The wing has been made of plastic through additive manufacturing process and the material used has been experimentally characterized to be correlated with FE simulations. Then, a first virtual model of a carbon fiber morphing wing has been designed in order to estimate the best piezoelectric system configurations. In this case, a fluid-dynamic simulation have been carried out to take into account the aerodynamic load effects.Finally, the results discussion highlights the pros and cons regarding this first-stage technology application.

Feasability Study on Piezoelectric Actuated Automotive Morphing Wing

Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/SMASIS/SMASIS2021/volume/85499

ASME 2021 Smart Materials, Adaptive Structures and Intelligent Systems (SMASIS2021)

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