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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…
Insects excel in trajectory and attitude handling during flight, yet the specific kinematic behaviours they use for maintaining stability in air disturbances are not fully understood. This study investigates the adaptive strategies of…
Insects control unsteady aerodynamic forces on flapping wings to navigate complex environments. While understanding these forces is vital for biology, physics, and engineering, existing evaluation methods face trade-offs: high-fidelity…
The natural wind environment that volant insects encounter is unsteady and highly complex, posing significant flight control and stability challenges. Unsteady airflows can range from structured chains of discrete vortices shed in the wake…
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…
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…
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…
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)…
Approximately half of the existing winged-insect species are of very small size (wing length about 0.3-4 mm); they are referred to as miniature insects. Yet until recently, much of what we know about the mechanics of insect flight was…
The fruit fly D. melanogaster is increasingly used as a model organism for studying acute hypoxia tolerance and for studying aging, but the interactions between these two factors are not well known. Here we show that hypoxia tolerance…
In flapping flight, motion of the wings through the air generates the majority of the force and torque that controls the body motion. On the other hand, it is not clear how much effect the body motion imposes on the wings. We investigated…
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 effect of air viscosity on the flow around an insect wing increases as insect size decreases. For the smallest insects (wing length R below 1 mm), the viscous effect is so large that lift-generation mechanisms used by their larger…
Wing flexibility governs the flying performance of flapping wing flyers. Here, we use a self-propelled flapping-wing model mounted on a ``merry go round'' to investigate the effect of wing compliance on the propulsive efficiency of the…
In this paper, we present a full dynamical model of a four-winged micro ornithopter inspired by a dragonfly-type insect. The micro ornithopter is modeled as four articulated rigid body components (wings) connected to the main body via…
The radical-pair mechanism is understood to underlie the magnetic navigation capability of birds and possibly other species. Experiments with birds have provided indirect and in cases conflicting evidence on the actual existence of this…
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…
Sub-gram flapping-wing flying insect robots (FIRs) are challenging to model because of mechanical complexity in their wings, unsteady aerodynamic flow, and the difficulty of making precise measurements at a small scale. Coupling effects…
Turbulence is omnipresent in the atmosphere and a long-standing scientific conundrum that makes flight complex. This complexity is little understood; surprisingly, when turbulence arises, air vehicles struggle while birds seem to thrive.…
Flapping insects are remarkably agile fliers, adapted to a highly turbulent environment. We present a series of high resolution numerical simulations of a bumblebee interacting with turbulent inflow. We consider both tethered and free…