Related papers: Cicada: a Heavy but Agile Flyer
Hummingbirds and insects achieve outstanding flight performance by adapting their flapping motion to the flight requirements. Their wing kinematics can change from smooth flapping to highly dynamic waveforms, generating unsteady aerodynamic…
Wing flexibility plays an essential role in the aerodynamic performance of insects due to the considerable deformation of their wings during flight under the impact of inertial and aerodynamic forces. These forces come from the complex wing…
Turning takeoff flights of several dragonflies were recorded during which a dragonfly takes off while changing the flight direction at the same time. Center of mass was elevated about 1-2 body lengths. Five of these maneuvers were selected…
This expository review is devoted to fish swimming and bird/insect flight. (i) The simple waving motion of an elongated flexible ribbon plate of constant width, immersed in a fluid at rest, propagating a wave distally down the plate to swim…
Natural flyers use soft wings to seamlessly enable a wide range of flight behaviours, including agile manoeuvres, squeezing through narrow passageways, and withstanding collisions. In contrast, conventional quadrotor designs rely on rigid…
Tiny flying insects of body lengths under 2 mm use the `clap-and-fling' mechanism with bristled wings for lift augmentation and drag reduction at chord-based Reynolds number ($Re$) on $\mathcal{O}$(10). We examine wing-wing interaction of…
Damselflies show abrupt, darting flight, which is the envy of aero-engineers. This amazing ability is used both to capture prey and, by males, to establish territories that can attract females. In this work, high-resolution, high-speed…
We investigate the hovering dynamics of rigid bodies with up-down asymmetry placed in oscillating background flows. Recent experiments on inanimate pyramid-shaped objects in oscillating flows with zero mean component demonstrate that the…
Motivated by recent experimental advances (Stroock et al. 2002) in microfluidic mixers, we study the passive mixing and flow properties of a patterned microchannel by means of computational fluid dynamics (CFD). Such geometries overcome the…
A large number of insect species feed primarily on a fluid diet. To do so, they must overcome the numerous challenges that arise in the design of high-efficiency, miniature pumps. Although the morphology of insect feeding structures has…
Approximating wind flows using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) methods can be time-consuming. Creating a tool for interactively designing prototypes while observing the wind flow change requires simpler models to simulate faster. Instead…
Unlike a helicopter, an insect can, in theory, use both lift and drag to stay aloft. Here we show that a dragonfly uses mostly drag to hover by employing asymmetric up and down strokes. Computations of a family of strokes further show that…
A new three-dimensional (3D) multiphase computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model for adsorption physics in packed beds of spherical beads is developed and validated. The model is constituted at a macroscopic scale that integrates new…
We experiment with injecting a continuous stream of gas into a shallow liquid, similar to how one might blow into a straw placed at the bottom of a near-empty drink. By varying the angle of the straw (here a metal needle), we observe a…
Drones, like most airborne aerial vehicles, face inherent disadvantages in achieving agile flight due to their limited thrust capabilities. These physical constraints cannot be fully addressed through advancements in control algorithms…
Hovering insects are limited by their physiology and need to rotate their wings at the end of each back and forth motion to keep the wing's leading edge ahead of its trailing edge. The wing rotation at the end of each half-stroke pushes the…
This paper presents a modeling and control framework for multibody flying robots subject to non-negligible aerodynamic forces acting on the centroidal dynamics. First, aerodynamic forces are calculated during robot flight in different…
Fluidic locomotion of flapping Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) can be very complex, particularly when the rules from insect flight dynamics (fast flapping dynamics and light wings) are not applicable. In these situations, widely used averaging…
Despite significant analysis of bird flight, generative physics models for flight dynamics do not currently exist. Yet the underlying mechanisms responsible for various flight manoeuvres are important for understanding how agile flight can…
Applications of deep learning to physical simulations such as Computational Fluid Dynamics have recently experienced a surge in interest, and their viability has been demonstrated in different domains. However, due to the highly complex,…