The morphing of aircraft wings for flight control started as a necessity for the Wright Brothers but quickly fell out of favor as aircraft increased speed. Currently morphing aircraft control is one of many ideas being explored as we seek to improve aircraft efficiency, reduce noise, and other alternative aircraft solutions. The conventional hinged control surface took over as the predominant method for control due to its simplicity and allowing stiffer wings to be built. With modern technologies in variable stiffness materials, actuators, and design methods, a morphing control surface, which considers deforming a significant portion of the wing's surface continuously, can be considered. While many have considered morphing designs on the scale of small and medium size UAVs, few look at it for full-size commercial transport aircraft. One promising technology in this field is the flexible matrix composite (FMC) actuator. This muscle-like actuator can be embedded with the deformable structure and unlike many other actuators continue to actuate with the morphing of the structure. This was demonstrated in the FMC active spoiler prototype, which was a full-scale benchtop prototype, demonstrated to perform under closed-loop control for both the required deflection and load cases. Based on this FMC active spoiler concept a morphing aileron design was examined. To do this an analysis coupling the structure, fluid, and FMC actuator models was created. This allows for optimization of the design with the objectives of minimizing the hydraulic energy required and mass of the system by varying the layout of the FMC aileron, the material properties used, and the actuator's design and placement with the morphing section. Based on a commercial transport aircraft a design case was developed to investigate the optimal design of a morphing aileron using the developed analysis tool. The optimization looked at minimizing the mass and energy requirements of the morphing aileron and was subject to a series of constraints developed from the design case and the physical limitations of the system. A Pareto front was developed for these two objectives and the resulting designs along the Pareto front explored. From this optimization, a series of design guidelines were developed. / Ph. D.

The field of micro total analysis systems (μTAS) aims at developments toward miniaturized and fully integrated lab-on-a-chip systems for applications, such as drug screening, drug delivery, cellular assays, protein analysis, genomic analysis and handheld point-of-care diagnostics. Such systems offer to dramatically reduce liquid sample and reagent quantities, increase sensitivity as well as speed of analysis and facilitate portable systems via the integration of components such as pumps, valves, mixers, separation units, reactors and detectors. Precise microfluidic control for such systems has long been considered one of the most difficult technical barriers due to integration of on-chip fluidic handling components and complicated off-chip liquid control as well as fluidic interconnections. Actuation principles and materials with the advantages of low cost, easy fabrication, easy integration, high reliability, and compact size are required to promote the development of such systems. Within this thesis, liquid displacement in microfluidic applications, by means of expandable microspheres, is presented as an innovative approach addressing some of the previously mentioned issues. Furthermore, these expandable microspheres are embedded into a PDMS matrix, which composes a novel thermally responsive silicone elastomer composite actuator for liquid handling. Due to the merits of PDMS and expandable microspheres, the composite actuator's main characteristic to expand irreversibly upon generated heat makes it possible to locally alter its surface topography. The composite actuator concept, along with a novel adhesive PDMS bonding technique, is used to design and fabricate liquid handling components such as pumps and valves, which operate at work-ranges from nanoliters to microliters. The integration of several such microfluidic components promotes the development of disposable lab-on-a-chip platforms for precise sample volume control addressing, e.g. active dosing, transportation, merging and mixing of nanoliter liquid volumes. Moreover, microfluidic pumps based on the composite actuator have been incorporated with sharp and hollow microneedles to realize a microneedle-based transdermal patch which exhibits on-board liquid storage and active dispensing functionality. Such a system represents a first step toward painless, minimally invasive and transdermal administration of macromolecular drugs such as insulin or vaccines. The presented on-chip liquid handling concept does not require external actuators for pumping and valving, uses low-cost materials and wafer-level processes only, is highly integrable and potentially enables controlled and cost-effective transdermal microfluidic applications, as well as large-scale integrated fluidic networks for point-of care diagnostics, disposable biochips or lab-on-a-chip applications. This thesis discusses several design concepts for a large variety of microfluidic components, which are promoted by the use of the novel composite actuator. Results on the successful fabrication and evaluation of prototype devices are reported herein along with comprehensive process parameters on a novel full-wafer adhesive bonding technique for the fabrication of PDMS based microfluidic devices. / QC 20100817