Description: Aerodynamic and structural reliability and efficiency depends critically on the ability to accurately assess the aerodynamic loads and moments for each lifting surface. A thin-film, flight-worthy sensor capable of providing spatio-temporally accurate estimation of aerodynamic coefficients enables revolutionary energy-efficient, physics-based, force-feedback flight control of a wide range of vehicles from subsonic to supersonic flows. Recent biophysics research has uncovered sensory techniques to recover information from the noisy environment. Tao Systems proposes to develop a unique sensor that robustly applies these biomimetic sensory techniques to the aerodynamic problem to obtain accurate estimates of aerodynamic coefficients with minimal calibration requirements.

Benefits: For national security, the ability to cruise efficiently at a range of altitude, enabled by a substantial increase in cruise lift-to-drag (L/D) ratios over today's high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft, is vital, providing sustained presence and long range. Aerodynamic load/moment sensors would enable the efficient, robust active control of adaptive, lightweight wings to optimize lift distribution to maximize L/D. Cost-effectively improving the energy capture and reliability of wind turbines would help national renewable energy initiatives. A standalone aerodynamic load/moment sensor could provide output for control feedback to mitigate the turbine blade lifetime-limiting time varying loads generated by the ambient wind.

Accurate real-time aerodynamic load/moment sensors will enable a number of revolutionary capabilities across a wide speed range, including, but not limited to: (1) shorter take-off and landing, (2) safe, reliable supersonic operation, and (3) larger passenger and cargo capacity. The primary difficulty in all three revolutionary capabilities is the uncertainty in aerodynamic load \& moments generated by the airstream in design and off-design conditions, e.g., turbulent flows and high angles of attack. Measuring the aerodynamic loads/moments reduces the aerodynamic uncertainty enabling the aircraft to timely, robustly compensate for the adverse flow conditions. Therefore, the proposed innovation could be of significant interest to the aircraft civilian industry.