Related papers: Miniature insect flight
The passive flight of a thin wing or plate is an archetypal problem in flow-structure interactions at intermediate Reynolds numbers. This seemingly simple aerodynamic system displays an impressive variety of steady and unsteady motions that…
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…
Scientific progress within the last few decades has revealed the functional morphology of an insect's sticky footpads -- a soft, sponge-like pad that secretes a thin liquid film. However, the physico-chemical mechanisms underlying their…
In this paper, we introduce advances in the sensor suite of an autonomous flying insect robot (FIR) weighing less than a gram. FIRs, because of their small weight and size, offer unparalleled advantages in terms of material cost and…
Recently, the authors considered a thin steady developed viscous liquid wall jet passing the sharp trailing edge of a horizontally aligned flat plate under surface tension and the weak action of gravity acting vertically in the asymptotic…
Bacteria predate plants and animals by billions of years. Today, they are the world's smallest cells yet they represent the bulk of the world's biomass, and the main reservoir of nutrients for higher organisms. Most bacteria can move on…
Inexpensive, portable lab-on-a-chip devices would revolutionize fields like environmental monitoring and global health, but current microfluidic chips are tethered to extensive off-chip hardware. Insects, however, are self-contained and…
While dragonflies are highly agile flyers, some key aerodynamic mechanisms responsible for their flight performance remain inadequately understood. Based on forward flight conditions, we investigate dragonfliess spanwise aerodynamic…
With the emergence of new flapping-wing micro aerial vehicle (FWMAV) designs, a need for extensive and advanced mission capabilities arises. FWMAVs try to adapt and emulate the flight features of birds and flying insects. While current…
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…
This research investigates the three-dimensional effects of flow around a pair of flapping wings undergoing clap-and-fling interactions through harmonic in-plane motions combining pitching, heaving, and deviation. Both wings mirror each…
Flying insects can perform rapid, sophisticated maneuvers like backflips, sharp banked turns, and in-flight collision recovery. To emulate these in aerial robots weighing less than a gram, known as flying insect robots (FIRs), a fast and…
Oblique collision of solid particles with surfaces has been a topic of extensive study in Newtonian mechanics, which also explains the motion of bubbles and droplets to some extent. Here, we observe that air bubbles exhibit a backflipping…
Bird strikes present a huge risk for aircraft, especially since traditional airport bird surveillance is mainly dependent on inefficient human observation. Computer vision based technology has been proposed to automatically detect birds,…
In this study, we systematically investigate the behaviors of viscoelastic liquid jets using an impulsive force, particularly in the high velocity and high elasticity regimes. The resulting jets are categorized into two types: (i) pinch-off…
Air ducts are integral to modern buildings but are challenging to access for inspection. Small quadrotor drones offer a potential solution, as they can navigate both horizontal and vertical sections and smoothly fly over debris. However,…
The Worthington jets from bursting bubbles at a gas-liquid interface can break up into small droplets, aerosolizing chemical and biological substances into the atmosphere and impacting both global climate and public health. Despite their…
Wind turbines operate in the atmospheric boundary layer, where they are exposed to the turbulent atmospheric flows. As the response time of wind turbine is typically in the range of seconds, they are affected by the small scale intermittent…
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…
Tracking a turbulent plume to locate its source is a complex control problem because it requires multi-sensory integration and must be robust to intermittent odors, changing wind direction, and variable plume statistics. This task is…