Climate change is an existential threat. Achieving climate neutrality requires synergistic actions from two aspects: 1) exploiting sustainable energy sources, including wind energy; 2) enhancing energy consumption efficiency, such as making flights more energy-efficient. However, aerospace and wind energy sciences are facing a dilemma: the pursuit of efficiency has driven their structures to evolve towards having slender configurations and ultralight materials. Unfortunately, the resulting increase in flexibility also makes structures more sensitive to atmospheric disturbances, leading to undesirable vibrations, fatigue, and even fatal accidents.

“Smart” active morphing has great potential to revolutionise aerospace and wind energy sciences as flexibility is exploited to actively adapt structure shape during air operations, like birds do. This is a challenging research area requiring interdisciplinary expertise (aeroelasticity, control, and optimisation). In this seminar, Xuerui Wang will discuss about the control of morphing structures and will present open challenges that can be tackled from the control point of view.

Xuerui Wang received her Ph.D. degree in aerospace engineering from Delft University of Technology (TUD), Delft, the Netherlands, in 2019. From May 2019 to May 2020, she was a postdoctoral researcher with the Smart and Aeroelastic Structure Laboratory in TUD.