Wing-Body Junction Flow Control Using a PAM-Actuated Morphing Leading-Edge Fairing

This work presents an experimental study on aerodynamic flow control at the wing-body junction using a morphing leading-edge fairing actuated by a pneumatic artificial muscle (PAM). The compliant Ecoflex® 00–31 fairing, driven by a McKibben-type actuator, was designed to dynamically reshape the junction region and influence the formation of horseshoe and corner vortices. Deformation measurements obtained via digital image correlation showed 2.5-3 mm surface deflection at 70 psi. Experiments were conducted in a low-speed wind tunnel using a NACA 0015 model, with smoke visualization performed across freestream velocities of 5-20 m/s and actuation frequencies up to 10 Hz. Actuation in the 5-10 Hz range produced the most notable flow modifications at moderate-to-high angles of attack, including wake narrowing, redirected streaklines, and localized suppression of separation. At lower angles of attack and lower freestream velocities, the resulting flow modifications were considerably weaker and in many cases indistinguishable from baseline unsteadiness. To the authors’ knowledge, this study provides the first experimental demonstration of PAM-driven morphing applied to wing-body junction flow control. The results illustrate the feasibility of soft robotic actuation for real-time aerodynamic surface adaptation and motivate future work involving quantitative velocity-field measurements and integrated CFD-experiment comparisons.