Related papers: Thrust force is tuned by the rigidity distribution…

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…

When a liquid viscous bridge between two parallel substrates is stretched by accelerating one substrate, its interface recedes in the radial direction. In some cases the interface becomes unstable. Such instability leads to the emergence of…

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…

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…

An overexpanded jet in a truncated ideally contoured nozzle is found to feature a tonal behavior. The flow field is investigated to understand its origin and show how it modifies side-load properties. The temporal and spatial organization…

While engineers put lots of effort, resources, and time in building insect scale micro aerial vehicles (MAVs) that fly like insects, insects themselves are the real masters of flight. What if we would use living insect as platform for MAV…

Wrinkling of an inextensible elastic lining of an inner-lined tube under imposed pressure is considered. A simple equation modeling the elastic properties of the lining, the pressure, and the soft-substrate forces is derived. This equation…

Estimating the direction of ambient fluid flow is key for many flying or swimming animals and robots, but can only be accomplished through indirect measurements and active control. Recent work with tethered flying insects indicates that…

A flexible membrane deforming its shape in time can self-propel in a viscous fluid. Alternatively, if the membrane is anchored, its deformation will lead to fluid transport. Past work in this area focused on situations where the deformation…

Flight on the two-dimensional air-water interface, with body weight supported by surface tension, is a unique locomotion strategy well adapted for the environmental niche on the surface of water. Although previously described in…

Unsteady inviscid flow models of wings and airfoils have been developed to study the aerodynamics of natural and man-made flyers. Vortex methods have been extensively applied to reduce the dimensionality of these aerodynamic models, based…

A preliminary numerical study on the aerodynamics of a kite wing for high altitude wind power generators is proposed. Tethered kites are a key element of an innovative wind energy technology, which aims to capture energy from the wind at…

Collective patterns of motion emerge across biological taxa: insects swarm, fish school, and birds flock. In particular, large migratory birds form strikingly ordered V-shaped formations, which experiments and direct numerical simulations…

Aircraft failures alter the aircraft dynamics and cause maneuvering flight envelope to change. Such envelope variations are nonlinear and generally unpredictable by the pilot as they are governed by the aircraft's complex dynamics. Hence,…

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…

Recent studies have pointed out the importance of the basal friction on the dynamics of granular flows. We present experimental results on the influence of the roughness of the inclined plane on the dynamics of a monodisperse dry granular…

We have studied numerically the dynamics of a directed elastic string in a two-dimensional array of quenched random impurities. The string is driven by a constant transverse force and thermal fluctuations are neglected. There is a…

This paper examines two-dimensional liquid curtains ejected at an angle to the horizontal and affected by gravity and surface tension. The flow is, to leading order, shearless and viscosity, negligible. The Froude number is large, so that…

Biological locomotion, observed in the flexible wings of birds and insects, bodies and fins of aquatic mammals and fishes, consists of their ability to morph the wings/fins. The morphing capability holds significance in the abilities of…

Motivated by diverse phenomena in cellular biophysics, including bacterial flagellar motion and DNA transcription and replication, we study the overdamped nonlinear dynamics of a rotationally forced filament with twist and bend elasticity.…