Aircraft Stowable Wing Assembly with Offset Driveshaft
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Solution Overview
Problem
Aircraft with elongated wings face challenges in storage and maintenance due to their large footprint, often not fitting through standard doors or facilities, limiting access and storage capacity.
Innovation Solution
A stowable wing assembly with a selectively rotatable wing body and retractable driveshaft system that allows the wing to pivot between flight and stowed positions, reducing the overall footprint by misaligning the driveshaft with the gearbox when stowed, enabling compact storage and access to restricted spaces.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Adaptability or versatility
If the aircraft has elongated wings for flight capability, then flight performance is improved, but the storage footprint and access difficulty increase
Solution Approach 1:
The wing assembly is made dynamically reconfigurable through a stowable mechanism that allows it to transition between an extended flight position and a retracted stowed position. The driveshaft selectively engages and disengages from the gearbox to enable this dynamic transformation, reducing the aircraft's footprint from approximately 50-100 square feet in flight configuration to 10-20 square feet in stowed configuration.
Solution Approach 2:
The driveshaft is designed to selectively engage with the gearbox, allowing the wing assembly to be nested or folded into a compact configuration during storage. The driveshaft acts as a mechanical linkage that enables the wing to be positioned within the fuselage or alongside it, similar to nested dolls, thereby minimizing the overall storage footprint while maintaining full flight capability when deployed.
2Ease of operation
If the driveshaft is aligned with the stow axis, then the wing can be stowed, but the driveshaft cannot selectively engage the gearbox during rotation
Solution Approach 1:
The driveshaft is deliberately positioned asymmetrically, offset from the stow axis by a distance of 6-18 inches. This asymmetric positioning creates a mechanical advantage where the driveshaft naturally aligns with the gearbox during specific phases of the rotation cycle, enabling reliable selective engagement. The offset position allows the driveshaft to approach the gearbox at an optimal angle for splined connection while still permitting full rotation for stowing.
Solution Approach 2:
The system is designed so that during the rotation of the wing assembly, the driveshaft automatically aligns with and engages the gearbox at a predetermined position in the rotation cycle. This preliminary alignment action occurs naturally through the mechanical geometry of the offset driveshaft and gearbox arrangement, ensuring that engagement happens at the optimal moment before the stowing action completes, thereby maintaining reliability without requiring additional control mechanisms.
3Reliability
If the driveshaft is offset from the stow axis, then selective engagement with gearbox is enabled, but misalignment occurs during stowed position
Solution Approach 1:
The offset driveshaft system operates on a periodic cycle where the wing assembly rotates through a full 360 degrees. During each rotation cycle, the driveshaft naturally aligns with the gearbox at a specific angular position, engages during the power transmission phase, and disengages as the wing approaches the stowed position. This periodic engagement and disengagement pattern manages the misalignment issue by accepting it as a temporary state that resolves itself through continuous rotation, eliminating the need for complex real-time alignment control systems.
Data Source
AI summary
Systems and methods include providing an aircraft with a fuselage and a wing assembly rotatable relative to the fuselage about a stow axis between a flight position and a stowed position. The aircraft includes a gearbox having a retractable driveshaft that selectively engages the mid-wing gearbox via axially translatable motion along a rotation axis when the wing assembly is in the flight position. The retractable driveshaft also selectively disengages the mid-wing gearbox in the flight position to allow selectively rotation of the wing assembly about the stow axis from the flight position to the stowed position resulting in the mid-wing gearbox being misaligned with the retractable driveshaft when the wing assembly is in the stowed position.