Effect of yaw-tilted hinge axis on deployment robustness of mars airplane

This paper investigates the robustness of the aerial deployment behavior of the foldable-wing airplane for Mars exploration especially focused on the effect of the hinge axis tilting in a yaw direction. This study deals with four dispersive parameters for the robustness evaluation: drop velocity, surrounding gust velocity, initial pitch angle, and height. The robustness of several tilted and non-tilted hinge axis designs are calculated and then compared. The result clearly shows that the tilted hinge axis design can deploy with lower torque than the torque of the non-tilted hinge axis design. The increase of sideslip angle due to the hinge axis tilting suppressed an aerodynamic force on the deploying wing.