Electrical Multiscale Bio-inspired Live-skin interfaces in Aeronautics – EMBIA

Inspired from the highly efficient aerodynamics of birds, versatility of the jelly-moon fringes, manta ray and sharks, the multidisciplinary project EMBIA creates a “live skin” composed of an innovative moving interface between an air-vehicle and the surrounding turbulence. The solid-fluid interface is composed of electroactive fringes made of an optimized combination of Carbon-Nano-Tubes and Graphene with high sensing and actuation capacity, able to deform and vibrate. This interacts with the surrounding inhomogeneous turbulent flow. The “live skin” will rely on Artificial Intelligence to optimise the dynamics of the system in real time, based on Wind Tunnel experiments and Hi-Fi-CFDSM.The design has as kernel a hierarchy of the interfaces, from micro to macro-scale, between material-material, material-flow and flow-flow. Applied around an aircraft’s wing, this increases the aerodynamic performance and reduces energy consumption far beyond all systems currently under study.