Related papers: Four-winged flapping flyer in forward flight
Natural fliers like bats exploit the complex fluid-structure interaction between their flexible membrane wings and the air with great ease. Yet, replicating and scaling the balance between the structural and fluid-dynamical parameters of…
Existing research has yet to reach a consensus on whether and how small flying animals utilize elastic energy storage mechanisms to reduce flight energy expenditure, and there is a lack of systematic and universal methods for assessment. To…
Stability of flapping flight, a natural requirement for flying insects, is one of the major challenges for designing micro aerial vehicles (MAVs). To better understand how a flying insect could stabilize itself during hover, we have…
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…
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)…
We investigate the effect of wing twist flexibility on lift and efficiency of a flapping-wing micro air vehicle capable of liftoff. Wings used previously were chosen to be fully rigid due to modeling and fabrication constraints. However,…
Linear stability analysis of an elastically anchored wing in a uniform flow is investigated both analytically and numerically. The analytical formulation explicitly takes into account the effect of the wake on the wing by means of…
In this work, we have performed numerical simulations of the flapping motion of a rectangular wing in a three-dimensional flow field using the discrete vortex method (DVM). The DVM method is computationally more convenient because it does…
Unmanned micro aerial vehicle research is an active area of development due to the vast potential applications. Prior work towards realizing flapping flight has achieved some success however they have relied heavily upon the use of rotary…
Insects and birds are often faced by opposing requirements for agile and stable flight. Here, we explore the interplay between aerodynamic effort, maneuverability, and stability in a model system that consists of a $\Lambda$-shaped flyer…
In this work, we present an experimental setup and guide to enable the perching of large flapping-wing robots. The combination of forward flight, limited payload, and flight oscillations imposes challenging conditions for localized…
The autonomous operation of flexible-wing aircraft is technically challenging and has never been presented within literature. The lack of an exact modeling framework is due to the complex nonlinear aerodynamic relationships governed by the…
Inspired by flight characteristics captured from live Monarch butterflies, an optimal control problem is presented while accounting the effects of low-frequency flapping and abdomen undulation. A flapping-wing aerial vehicle is modeled as…
We study the role of unsteady lift in the context of flapping wings in birds' flight. Both aerodynamicists and biologists attempt to address this subject, yet it seems that the contribution of the unsteady lift still holds many open…
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…
We examine theoretically the flow interactions and forward flight dynamics of tandem or in-line flapping wings. Two wings are driven vertically with prescribed heaving-and-plunging motions, and the horizontal propulsion speeds and positions…
Flapping wings are the primary means by which dragonflies generate forces, but they are susceptible to damage due to their inherent fragility. The damage results in a reduction in wing area and a distortion of the original wing, which in…
We explore the rotational stability of hovering flight. Our model is motivated by an experimental pyramid-shaped object and a computational lambda-shaped analog hovering passively in oscillating airflows; both systems have been shown to…
Flow visualisations are essential to better understand the unsteady aerodynamics of flapping wing flight. The issues inherent to animal experiments, such as poor controllability and unnatural flapping when tethered, can be avoided by using…
Recent theoretical and experimental investigations have revealed that flapping compliant membrane wings can significantly enhance propulsive performance (e.g. Tzezana and Breuer, 2019, J. Fluid Mech., 862, 871-888) and energy harvesting…