Myliobatidae is a family of large pelagic rays including cownose, eagle and manta rays. They are extremely efficient swimmers, can cruise at high speeds and can perform turn-on-a-dime maneuvering, making these fishes excellent inspiration for an autonomous underwater vehicle. Myliobatoids have been studied extensively from a biological perspective; however the fluid mechanisms that produce thru...

Over the last decade, interest in animal flight has grown, in part due to the possible use of flapping propulsion for micro air vehicles. The importance of unsteady lift-enhancing mechanisms in insect flight has been recognized, but unsteady effects were generally thought to be absent for the flapping flight of larger animals. Only recently has the existence of LEVs (leading edge vortices) in s...

Insects are excellent fliers because of their ability to generate precise wing kinematics and deform wings for the sufficient production unsteady aerodynamic forces. Most previous studies on effects aerodynamics have been limited use rigid wings, leaves contribution flexibility unknown. Here, an experiment was conducted investigate effect varied sweep duration timing rotation characteristics ho...

The design of efficient flapping wings for human engineered micro aerial vehicles (MAVs) has long been an elusive goal, in part due to the large size of the design space. One strategy for overcoming this difficulty is to use a multi-fidelity simulation strategy appropriately balances computation time and accuracy. We compare two models with different geometric and physical fidelity. The low-fid...

Many research studies have investigated the characteristics of bird flights as a source bioinspiration for design flapping-wing micro air vehicles. However, to best authors’ knowledge, no drone targeted exploitation aerodynamic benefits associated with avian group formation flight. Therefore, in this work, conceptual novel multi-flapping-wing that incorporates multiple pairs wings arranged V-sh...

Flying insects may enhance their flight force production by contralateral wing interaction during dorsal stroke reversal ('clap-and-fling'). In this study, we explored the forces and moments due to clap-and-fling at various wing tip trajectories, employing a dynamically scaled electromechanical flapping device. The 17 tested bio-inspired kinematic patterns were identical in stroke amplitude, st...

Thank you for your consideration of the manuscript entitled “Surprising Behaviors in Flapping Locomotion with Passive Pitching.” We were pleased to receive the positive feedback from the referees. In our revised submission we have made a number of adjustments in response to the referees’ comments and suggestions. In response to the first referee’s comments, we have added to the paper a short ex...

The jellyfish-like flying machine is a new development direction of the future bionic flapping-wing aircraft besides insect-mimic and bird-mimic micro air vehicles (MAVs). To better understand underlying fluid mechanisms flyer, we numerically simulated aerodynamic forces three-dimensional flapping wings under different control parameters. effects amplitude, vortex wake, up-flight speed, wing–wi...

Nomenclature C = chord length, m C T = thrust coefficient f = flapping frequency, Hz h tip = plunge amplitude at the wing tip, m k = ωC∕U ∞ , reduced frequency l span = wingspan, m Re = U ∞ C∕ν, Reynolds number r z = z-directional distance away from the wing tip, m S wing = wing area, m 2 St = fh tip ∕U ∞ , Strouhal number U ∞ = freestream velocity, m∕s ν = kinematic viscosity of fluid, m 2 ∕s ...

This paper presents an overview of the on-going research activities at Shrivenham, aimed at the design of an autonomous flapping-wing micro air vehicle. After introducing the problem of insect wing kinematics and aerodynamics, we describe our quasi-three-dimensional aerodynamic model for flapping wings. This is followed by a brief discussion of some aerodynamic issues relating to the lift-gener...