Modélisation de matériaux composites adaptatifs munis d'actionneurs en alliage à mémoire de forme

Abstract

Technological development of structures having the capabilities to adapt themselves to different operating conditions is increasing in many areas of research such as aerospace. In fact, numerous works are now oriented toward the design of adaptive aircraft wings where the goal is to enhance the aerodynamic properties of the wing. Following this approach, the work realised in the framework of this master thesis presents the steps leading to the creation of a numerical model that can be used to predict the behavior of an adaptive panel, and therefore, ventually of an adaptive aircraft wing. Foremost, the adaptive panel of this project has been designed from a carbon-epoxy composite, acting as host structure, where shape memory alloy (SMA) wires, acting as actuators, have been inserted in it. SMA actuators have also been embedded asymmetrically along the direction of the panel thickness in order to generate a bending moment when the SMA wires are activated. To achieve the modeling of such structure it has been firstly shown that a numerical model composed of only solid finite elements could be used to represent the panel. However, a second numerical model composed of shell, beam and link finite elements showed that identical results can be obtained with much less nodes (the first model was composed of more than 300 000 nodes compared with 1 000 nodes for the second). The combination of shell-beam-link elements has then been chosen. Secondly, a constitutive relation had to be used for modeling the particular behavior of SMA. For the present work, a uniaxial version of the Likhachev’s model is used. Due to its fairly straightforward mathematical formulation, this material law is able to model the main functional properties of SMA including the two-way shape memory effect (TWSME) at zero stress obtained after a thermomechanical education treatment. The last step was to compare the results of the numerical simulations with those obtained with a prototype where 19 actuators were embedded in a composite panel of 425 mm x 425 mm. Various load cases were performed. However, during experimental tests, it has been found that the measured actuator temperature was systematically underestimated. Therefore, by comparing the radius of curvature (ρ) of the panel as a function of the activation temperature (T) of the actuators, an offset (in temperature) between the curves numerically and experimentally obtained is observable. Aside from this technological difficulty, the experimental and numerical results are very similar and therefore, this numerical model can be used for predicting the behavior of an adaptive panel. In addition, one the main advantages of this numerical model resides in its versatility where it has been shown that a “warping” of the panel could be realized by controlling independently each actuator. Future works should now obviously focus on the temperature measurement while considering the improvement of the numerical model and the possibility to model an initially curved adaptive panel whose form could resemble an aircraft wing.

Date	2 May 2013
Original language	French
Awarding Institution	École de technologie supérieure
Supervisor	Patrick Terriault (Supervisor)