Related papers: Lift Enhancement by Dynamically Changing Wingspan …
Inspired by the natural motion of insects, fish, and other animals, flapping airfoils have gained significant importance due to their applications in fields such as ship propulsion, micro aerial vehicles, and autonomous underwater vehicles.…
Birds employ rapid pitch-up motions for different purposes: perching birds use this motion to decelerate and come to a complete stop while hunting birds, like bald eagles, employ it to catch prey and swiftly fly away. Motivated by these…
The leading edge vortex (LEV) is one of the most important lift augmentation mechanisms in flapping wing aerodynamics. We propose a methodology that aims to provide a quantitative description of the LEV. The first step of the method…
We perform direct numerical simulations of laminar separated flows over finite-aspect-ratio swept wings at a chord-base Reynolds number of $Re = 400$ to reveal a variety of wake structures generated for a range of aspect ratios…
We employ a novel computational modeling framework to perform high-fidelity direct numerical simulations of aero-structural interactions in bat-inspired membrane wings. The wing of a bat consists of an elastic membrane supported by a highly…
This study presents a novel spatially disrupted flow control system inspired by the covert feathers on bird wings. The system is a passive flow control system consisting of multiple feather-inspired flaps that dynamically interact with the…
Insect wings can undergo significant deformation during flapping motion owing to inertial, elastic and aerodynamic forces. Changes in shape then alter aerodynamic forces, resulting in a fully coupled Fluid-Structure Interaction (FSI)…
This paper deals with the investigation of flow field due to clap and fling mechanism using immersed boundary coupled with lattice Boltzmann method. The lattice Boltzmann method (LBM), an alternative to Navier Stokes solver, is used because…
The aerial environment in the operating domain of small-scale natural and artificial flapping wing fliers is highly complex, unsteady and generally turbulent. Considering flapping flight in an unsteady wind environment with a periodically…
This paper investigates the effects of geometric nonlinearity and structural flexibility on the flight dynamics of high-aspect-ratio wings representative of high-altitude long endurance aircraft configurations. A coupled aeroelastic flight…
Most biological flyers undergo orderly deformation in flight, and the deformations of wings lead to complex fluid-structure interactions. In this paper, an aerodynamic-structural coupling method of flapping wing is developed based on ANSYS…
Wing flapping is one of the most widespread propulsion methods found in nature; however, the current understanding of the aerodynamics in bird wakes is incomplete. The role of the unsteady motion in the flow and its contribution to the…
Using a flapping robot in a wind tunnel, we show that flapping faster amplifies existing longitudinal static stability (focusing on the pitch stiffness) and can even make an unstable flier stable. We show that stability for a flapper is not…
This study reports on the vortex-induced lift production mechanisms in low Reynolds number flows over low aspect-ratio rectangular wings. We use a rigorous force partitioning method which allows for the estimation of the pressure-induced…
Flapping flight and swimming are increasingly studied both due to their intrinsic scientific richness and their applicability to novel robotic systems. Strip theory is often applied to flapping wings, but such modeling is only rigorously…
The unsteady lift of a high-angle-of-attack, flat-plate wing encountering finite-length obstacles is studied using towing-tank force measurements. The wing translates from rest and interacts with a rectangular channel, ceiling, or ground…
We study experimentally a four-winged flapping flyer with chord-wise flexible wings in a self-propelled setup. For a given physical configuration of the flyer (i.e. fixed distance between the forewing and hindwing pairs and fixed wing…
This paper investigates stability analysis of flapping flight. Due to time-varying aerodynamic forces, such systems do not display fixed points of equilibrium. The problem is therefore approached via a limit cycle analysis based on Floquet…
The present work is concerned with the shape optimization of flapping wings in forward flight. The analysis is performed by combining a gradient-based optimizer with the unsteady vortex lattice method (UVLM). We describe the UVLM…
Flapping wing propulsion offers unrivalled manoeuvrability and efficiency at low flight speeds and in hover. These advantages are attributed to the leading edge vortex developing on an unsteady wing, which induces additional lift. We…