Flights will now be more efficient thanks to NASA’s foldable wings

Now airplanes would be able to fold their wings at various angles while airborne, all because of NASA.

NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center carried out these successful flight series containing the foldable-wings technology and was part of Spanwise Adaptive Wing project (SAW). NASA’s technology is based on characteristics of a lightweight temperature-activated material known as shape memory alloy instead of heavy machinery.

When the alloy is heated, it triggers a twisting motion in the tubes acting as the wings’ actuator that moves the wings’ outer part up to 70° upwards or downwards, reported NASA.

New airplane design uses less fuel, reduces pollution

“We wanted to see: can we move wings in flight, can we control them to any position we want to get aerodynamic benefits out of them, and could we do it with this new technology. Folding wings has been done in the past, but we wanted to prove the feasibility of doing this using shape memory alloy technology, which is compact, lightweight, and can be positioned in convenient places on the aircraft,” said SAW Co-Principal Investigator Othmane Benafan.

Through these foldable wings, normal commercial aircrafts can become accustomed with various flight conditions, providing pilots with more control over the planes and leading to an increase in fuel efficient flights and also providing the potential to fly faster than others. There would also be several benefits for both supersonic and subsonic future aircrafts.

However, currently the wings can fold in only one direction while in air with the need to rearrange the hardware each time the wings have to be tested in opposite direction. For the future, the team aims to further develop this technology until the foldable wings can move both up and down throughout a single flight. The researchers plan to carry out the next tests by summer 2018, according to Engadget.