The ‘Morphing’ in aerospace vehicle studies have focussed on aerodynamic performance, where it was demonstrated that morphing has potential advantages over its conventional counterparts.
The superiority of the morphing idea primarily focussed on savings in fuel consumption, range, and endurance improvement, cost and logistics savings, reduction in actuator energy, and maneuverability superiority.
There have been studies with a predominant focus on aerodynamic performance, that have demonstrated clear benefits of morphing as measured by aerodynamic performance metrics.
Several aero-elastic effects of morphing have also been studied relative to maximum roll rate and actuator loads.
Morphing has been cast as a reinforcement learning problem, been analyzed for actuator power requirements, and also employed for maneuvers such as perching.
Other investigations have considered control of morphing systems. Roll control was studied using piezoelectric materials. Other studies investigated control actuation energy and control authority requirement for changes in flight condition. Studies have considered morphing of control surfaces while others have used a morphing model with a distributed set of control effectors rather than a shape with fully time-varying dynamics.
