Wing flexibility is well established as providing gust rejection and delayed onset of stall for micro air vehicles. As such, many designs adopt wings of a flexible material mounted onto a skeleton comprised of a stiff leading-edge spar and stiff chordwise strips, called battens. These battens are shown to provide additional strength at localized regions of the wing and thus improve the gust rejection and delay stall; however, their effect on the flight dynamics is less studied. This paper explores a design space of vehicles with a varied number of wing battens mounted onto a baseline vehicle with a flexible wing. The battens are modeled as stepwise changes in torsional stiffness along the wing span. The resulting trim characteristics, static stability metrics and flight dynamics are evaluated. The battens are shown to improve gust rejection but otherwise have a complicated effect across the design space. A reduction in the number of battens improves static stability in the longitudinal axis but is detrimental in the lateral and directional axes. The damping is decreased for the short period mode and increased for the phugoid and dutch roll modes as the number of battens is reduced.
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