CROSS-LONGITUDINAL REINFORCEMENT STRUCTURE INSPIRED BY DRAGONFLY WING

The aim of this study is to establish a novel aircraft design approach replacing the conventional airframe by utilizing biomimetics. This design approach particularly focused on the dragonfly wing, whose reinforcement structures are composed of cross- veins and longitudinal veins. The cross-veins have been emulated by weighted Centroidal Voronoi Tessellation (WCVT) following the out-of-plane displacement on the skin, while the longitudinal veins have been emulated by extracting a centerline from the topology optimization result on the skin to be reinforced, through image analysis of binarization and skeletonization. The longitudinal layout can reduce the compliance distributing the inner load with only essential reinforcement on the skin without increasing the mass. The weighted CVT layout can improve the effectiveness of the reinforced skin against buckling drastically. Thus, the skin reinforced along the cross- longitudinal layout by the topology optimization and weighted CVT pattern increased buckling load 2.7 times higher even with less mass than the conventional layout.