Flapping Wing Air Vehicles at Kaist

The flapping wing flight has superior maneuverability and aerodynamic advantages in a low Reynolds number regime. Nature’s flyers generate aerodynamic forces and moments from the various wing motions such as flapping and pitching to fly and sustain its flight stability. Bioinspired design of flapping air vehicle is one of the effective ways to exploit such a complex system. However the flapping flight has been investigated using computational fluid dynamics and wind tunnel testing but not fully understood yet. In this talk, we propose a bio-inspired flapping air vehicle design framework considering fluid-structure interaction of flexible flapping-wing. I. INTEGRATED SIMULATION To successfully predict the flight characteristics of flapping air vehicles, the following three items need to be considered: 1) The structural wing deformation (finite element model of the flexible wing) and the kinematic motion of the ornithopter wing (flexible multi-body dynamics), 2) The flapping-wing aerodynamics, and 3) The fluidstructure interaction approach. In this study, we proposed the time-efficient integrative simulation framework for the longitudinal flight of model ornithopter considering fluid-structure interaction (See Fig. 1).