Related papers: Enhanced flight performance in non-uniformly flexi…
In the automotive industry, multi-element wings have been used to improve the aerodynamics of race cars. Multi-element wings can enhance a vehicle's handling and stability by reducing drag and increasing downforce, allowing it to corner…
We present a steady jet flow-based flow control of flexible membrane wings for an adaptive and efficient motion of bat-inspired drones in complex flight environments. A body-fitted variational computational aeroelastic framework is adopted…
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…
This paper discusses the wing inertial effects on stability of pitch motion of hovering insects. The paper also presents a dynamic model appropriate for using averaging techniques and discusses the pitch stability results derived from the…
Autonomous fixed-wing flight is becoming a key capability in aerial robotics, enabling sensing, mobility, and contingency operations across both small-scale Uncrewed Aircraft Systems and large-scale Advanced Air Mobility. During unpowered…
The propulsion of many eukaryotic cells is generated by flagella, flexible slender filaments that are actively oscillating in space and time. The dynamics of these biological appendages have inspired the design of many types of artificial…
Flapping animal flight is often modeled as a combined pitching and heaving motion in order to investigate the unsteady flow structures and resulting forces that could augment the animal's lift and propulsive capabilities. This work isolates…
Spanwise wall forcing in the form of streamwise-travelling waves is applied to the suction side of a transonic airfoil with a shock wave to reduce aerodynamic drag. The study, conducted using direct numerical simulations, extends earlier…
This paper evaluates and compares the performance of model-free and model-based reinforcement learning for the attitude control of fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles using PID as a reference point. The comparison focuses on their ability…
Bats' dynamic morphing wings are known to be extremely high-dimensional, and they employ the combination of inertial dynamics and aerodynamics manipulations to showcase extremely agile maneuvers. Bats heavily rely on their highly flexible…
Swimming and flying animals demonstrate remarkable adaptations to diverse flow conditions in their environments. In this study, we aim to advance the fundamental understanding of the interaction between flexible bodies and heterogeneous…
The study of flocking in biological systems has identified conditions for self-organized collective behavior, inspiring the development of decentralized strategies to coordinate the dynamics of swarms of drones and other autonomous…
Tubercles are modifications to the leading edge of an airfoil in the form of blunt wave-like serrations. Several studies on the effect of tubercles on isolated airfoils have shown a beneficial effect in the post-stall regime, as reduced…
The scope of the present project is to quantify the effects of uniform blowing and body-force damping on turbulent boundary layers subjected to a non-uniform adverse-pressure-gradient distribution. To this end, well-resolved large-eddy…
A single flexible filament can be actuated to escape from the scallop theorem and generate net propulsion at low Reynolds number. In this work, we study the dynamics of a simple boundary-driven multi-filament swimmer, a two-arm clamshell…
We present numerical simulations of simplified models for swimming organisms or robots, using chordwise flexible elastic plates. We focus on the tip vortices originating from three-dimensional effects due to the finite span of the plate.…
Passive elastic elements can contribute to stability, energetic efficiency, and impact absorption in both biological and robotic systems. They also add dynamical complexity which makes them more challenging to model and control. The impact…
We analyze a way to make flight vehicles harvest energy from homogeneous turbulence by fast tracking in the way that falling inertial particles do. Mean airspeed increases relative to flight through quiescent fluid when turbulent eddies…
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…
Machine learning-based models provide a promising way to rapidly acquire transonic swept wing flow fields but suffer from large computational costs in establishing training datasets. Here, we propose a physics-embedded transfer learning…