Bioinspired Electroactive Aeronautical multiscale LIVE-skin

Inspired from the highly efficient aerodynamics of birds, the versatility of the jelly-moon fringes, the manta ray and sharks, the multidisciplinary project BEALIVE introduces a new science and technology at the interface between aeronautics and bioengineering.

The project creates a “live skin” composed of an innovative moving interface between an air-vehicle and the surrounding turbulence.

Applied around a body, e.g. around an aircraft’s wing, this contributes to increase the aerodynamic performance and reduce noise far beyond all systems currently under study.

The solid-fluid interface is composed of a large number of electroactive fringes made of an optimized combination of Carbon-Nano-Tubes and Graphene with high sensing and actuation capacity, able to deform and vibrate. This allows the skin to interact with the surrounding inhomogeneous turbulent flow.

The interface between the solid and the fluid consists of the active fringes (shells) forming a porous-medium, modeled by poroelastic theory.

The interaction and manipulation of the fluid-structure and fluid-fluid turbulent interfaces will create an optimal new medium with no distinction between the fluid and the solid structure.

The “live skin” and the overall design will contain Big Data and rely on Artificial Intelligence and on a Controller that will define and optimise the dynamics of the system in real time and in large scale.

The optimization will be based on data assimilation from Wind Tunnel experiments and from Hi-Fi CFDSM (Computational Fluid-Dynamics Structural Mechanics) using a triple solver coupling: structural modelling (SM), porous layer and turbulent flow.

The design has as kernel a hierarchy of the interfaces, from micro to macroscale, between material-material, material-flow and flow-flow.

Such enhanced levels of manipulation will allow drastic increases of aerodynamic performance and energy efficiency in all flight phases, beyond any currently foreseeable targets.