Related papers: Rapidly pitching plates in decelerating motion nea…
The present work is concerned with the shape optimization of flapping wings in forward flight. The analysis is performed by combining a gradient-based optimizer with the unsteady vortex lattice method (UVLM). We describe the UVLM…
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,…
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…
The effect of pitch of the pillars and impact velocity are studied for the impact dynamics of a microliter water droplet on a micropillared hydrophobic surface. The results are presented qualitatively by the high-speed photography and…
The present study is a prelude to applying different flow control devices on pitching and plunging airfoils with the intention of controlling the growth of the leading edge vortex (LEV); hence, the lift under unsteady stall conditions. As a…
We bound the time it takes for a group of birds to reach steady state in a standard flocking model. We prove that (i) within single exponential time fragmentation ceases and each bird settles on a fixed flying direction; (ii) the flocking…
The albatross optimized flight maneuver -- known as dynamic soaring -- is nothing but a wonder of biology, physics, and engineering. By utilizing dynamic soaring, the bird can travel in the desired flight direction almost for free by…
We investigated the formation of granular focused jets defined as narrow upward ejections of grains triggered by impulsive forces and shaped by kinematic focusing on a concave free surface. The jets were generated from nonfluidized granular…
The dynamics of a cantilever plate clamped at its trailing edge and placed at a moderate angle ($\alpha \leq 30^{\circ}$) to a uniform flow are investigated experimentally and numerically, and a large experimental data set is provided. The…
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…
The influence of the bending rigidity of a flexible heaving wing on its propulsive performance in a two-dimensional imposed parallel flow is investigated in the inviscid limit. Potential flow theory is used to describe the flow over the…
The ground effect on multicopters introduces several challenges, such as control errors caused by additional lift, oscillations that may occur during near-ground flight due to external torques, and the influence of ground airflow on models…
We present a model appropriate to the initial motion (2-3 chords of travel) of a flat-plate airfoil accelerating in an inviscid fluid. The separated flow structures are represented as vortex sheets in the conventional manner and similarity…
Animals learn to adapt speed of their movements to their capabilities and the environment they observe. Mobile robots should also demonstrate this ability to trade-off aggressiveness and safety for efficiently accomplishing tasks. The aim…
Randomness is common in biological and artificial systems, resulting either from stochasticity of the environment or noise in organisms or devices themselves. In locomotor control, randomness is typically considered a nuisance. For example,…
Despite significant analysis of bird flight, generative physics models for flight dynamics do not currently exist. Yet the underlying mechanisms responsible for various flight manoeuvres are important for understanding how agile flight can…
Airfoils pitching in the stalled regime have been of keen interest in recent years due to their desirable aerodynamic force characteristics. In this study, we are numerically investigating the unsteady flow past a NACA 0012 airfoil under…
The design of a prototype to carry out take-off and flight tests with tethered aircrafts is presented. The system features a ground station equipped with a winch and a linear motion system. The motion of these two components is regulated by…
High speed video observations of free flying male Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, the dengue and yellow fever vector, along with custom measurement methods, enable measurement of wingbeat frequency, body position and body orientation of…
A flexible foil undergoing pitching oscillations is studied experimentally in a wind tunnel with different imposed free stream velocities. The chord-based Reynolds number is in the range 1600--4000, such that the dynamics of the system is…