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Rudders have long served as the primary flight control surface as is pertains to aircraft yaw. Breaking this mold, NASA's SAW technology is a game-changing development in aircraft wing engineering that reduces rudder motion required to control aircraft. The benefits of reduced rudder dependency led NASA to develop the outer aileron yaw damper to further decrease or eliminate rudder dependency for aircraft using SAWs. As mentioned, SAWs use shape memory alloy actuators to articulate the outer portion of the wing, effectively creating a movable wingtip. NASA's invention uses an outer aileron located on the wingtips, which is driven (along with the inner ailerons) by a novel control algorithm. The control algorithm, taking into account the wingtip positions, manipulates the outer ailerons to achieve the desired yaw rate. At the same time, it positions the inner ailerons to counter roll rate resulting from the outer aileron. In other words, the control algorithm calculates a control surface ratio (i.e., position of inboard aileron and outboard aileron) that produces desired yaw and roll accelerations. The system can also be used to offset the existing rudder in current or future aircraft designs. A second part of NASAs novel outer aileron control algorithm modifies the aircrafts rudder loop gain in proportion to outer aileron usage. This allows the outer ailerons and rudder to work in tandem, while at the same time reducing rudder usage. As a result of this NASA invention, required rudder usage can be reduced or eliminated for aircraft with SAWs. Consequently, the size of rudders and vertical tail structures can be reduced, which in turn reduces weight and parasitic drag. The result is an aircraft with increased performance and fuel efficiency.

Transonic flutter is a pacing item in transport aircraft design in that it is crucial to characterize this phenomenon for each aircraft to prevent catastrophic failure. Aerodynamic study of flows around airfoils is a canonical problem that entails both experimental and computational approaches. While the transonic flutter prediction can be more accurate with high-fidelity Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) methods than with unsteady potential flow methods, the computational cost is high. Therefore, computationally efficient methods for transonic flutter prediction continue to be of high interest to the aircraft design community. NASA Ames has developed a novel method that eliminates the need for expensive calculations of aerodynamics of wing flutter, which typically takes tens of hours on a supercomputer. Such calculations are now replaced by machine-learning-based closed form solutions that provide the solution almost instantaneously. The technology presents a new approach to predict the flow around pitching NACA00 series airfoils. NACA airfoils are generally symmetric, and thus they do not possess camber. However, the invention can readily extend to wings with camber. This novel data modeling approach is orders of magnitude faster than the traditional CFD approach of predicting aerodynamic effects of transonic pitching airfoils. The data model is based on a subset of unsteady CFD simulations that train the model. The trained model then resolves the pitching airfoil in time for any other set on the order of a second, as compared with a complete CFD simulation that typically takes 30 hours on a supercomputer. The data model is demonstrated in this invention for transonic flow corresponding to Mach number of 0.755 over pitching NACA00 series airfoils for a reduced frequency range typical of flutter, i.e., k lies in the range 0.02 - 0.25.