Insects are a prime source of inspiration towards the development of small-scale, engineered, flapping wing flight systems. To help interpret the possible energy transformation strategies observed in Diptera as inspiration for mechanical flapping flight systems, we revisit the perspective of the dipteran wing motor as a bistable click mechanism and take a new, and more flexible, outlook to the ...

Flapping wing dynamics are of great interest in many research areas, such as bioinspired systems and aircraft aeroelasticity. The findings the present study provide significant insight into importance leading-edge dynamic incidence on propulsive performance flapping airfoils. main objective is to improve characteristics by adding a pitching conventional NACA0012 airfoil at lower spectrum Reynol...

How to efficiently mimic the wing shape and kinematics pattern of an able hovering living flier is always a concern of researchers from the flapping wing micro aerial vehicles community. In this work, the separate or combined optimizations of wing geometry or/and wing kinematic parameters are systematically performed to minimize the energy of hovering flight, firstly on the basis of analyticall...

l We review here the results obtained during the past several years in a series of computational and experimental investigations aimed at understanding the origin of high-force production in the flapping wings of insects and the flapping and deforming fins of fish and the incorporation of that information into bioinspired vehicle designs. We summarize the results obtained on pectoral fin force ...

Insect- and bird-size drones-micro air vehicles (MAV) that can perform autonomous flight in natural and man-made environments are now an active and well-integrated research area. MAVs normally operate at a low speed in a Reynolds number regime of 10(4)-10(5) or lower, in which most flying animals of insects, birds and bats fly, and encounter unconventional challenges in generating sufficient ae...

A diversity of efficient solutions for flapping flight have evolved in nature; however, it is often difficult to isolate the key characteristics of efficient flapping flight from biological constraints. Rather than base micro aerial vehicle (MAV) design on natural flyers alone, we propose a multi-fidelity computational approach for analysis and design. At the lowest fidelity level, we use a wak...

The performance of recently proposed flag-based energy harvesters is strongly limited by the chaotic response of flags to strong winds. From an experimental point of view, the detection of flag chaotic dynamics were scarce, based on the flapping amplitude and the maximal Lyapunov exponent. In practice, tracking the flapping amplitude is difficult and flawed in the large oscillation limit. Also,...

A high order spectral difference (SD) scheme based cost-effective multi-level optimization approach is proposed to optimize the kinematics of flapping airfoils and provide further insights into flapping motions with maximum propulsive efficiency. At the first stage, a gradient-based optimization algorithm is coupled with a second-order SD Navier-Stokes solver to search for the optimal kinematic...

To design efficient flapping wing micro air vehicles (FWMAVs), a comprehensive sizing method based on theoretical and statistical analyses is proposed and experimentally verified. This method is composed of five steps including defining and analyzing the MAV mission, determining the flying modes, defining the wing shape and aspect ratio of the wing, applying the constraint analysis based on the...

As one of the most important components of a flapping-wing micro air vehicle (FWMAV), the design of an energy-efficient flapping-wing has been a research interest recently. Research on insect flight from different perspectives has been carried out, mainly with regard to wing morphology, flapping kinematics, and unsteady aerodynamics. However, the link between the wing morphology and kinematics ...