SYNOPSIS. Flapping flight and swimming in many organisms is accompanied by significant bending of flexible wings and fins. The instantaneous shape of wings and fins has, in turn, a profound effect on the fluid dynamic forces they can generate, with non-monotonic relationships between the pattern of deformation waves passing along the wing and the thrust developed. Many of these deformations ari...

Rhagoletis pomonella (Walsh) (Diptera: Tephritidae) is a quarantine pest of apple (Malus sp.) inWashington state that is almost identical morphologically to Rhagoletis zephyria Snow, a nonpest of apple. Historically, the longer ovipositor inR. pomonella has been used to separate it from R. zephyria, despite overlap in ovipositor lengths. Here, the objectives were to determinewhether use of mult...

A wind tunnel investigation was performed to study the flow field over a 70° swept sharped edge delta wing model at high angles of attack. The experiments were conducted in the subsonic wind tunnel at the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Sharif University of Technology. Velocity profiles have been measured using a special pitot tube and hot wire anemometer at angles of attacks of 10 to 35 ...

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...

The paper presents work on testing of inflatable wings for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Inflatable wing history and recent research is discussed. Design and construction of inflatable wings is then covered, along with ground and flight testing. Discussions include predictions and correlations of the forces required to warp (twist) the wings to a particular shape and the aerodynamic forces g...

RacGAP proteins have been shown to down-regulate members of the Rho/Rac subfamily, small GTPases controlling actin network organisation. Only one RacGAP protein, RnRacGAP, has been identified in Drosophila. To examine RnRacGAP function, we generated transgenic strains expressing RnRacGAP under the control of the heat-shock promoter hsp70. In cellularising embryos, ectopic RnRacGAP induces letha...

The size and shape of organs depend on cellular processes such as cell proliferation, cell survival, and spatial arrangement of cells. In turn, all of these processes are a consequence of positional identity of individual cells in whole organs. Links of positional information with organ growth and pattern expression of genes is a little-addressed question. We show that differences in vestigial ...

Many flying animals use both flapping and gliding flight as part of their routine behaviour. These two kinematic patterns impose conflicting requirements on wing design for aerodynamic efficiency and, in the absence of extreme morphing, wings cannot be optimised for both flight modes. In gliding flight, the wing experiences uniform incident flow and the optimal shape is a high aspect ratio wing...

A rapid shape parameterization tool called PROTEUS is developed for aircraft shape optimization. This tool can be applied directly to any aircraft geometry that has been defined in PLOT3D format, with the restriction that each aircraft component must be defined by only one data block. PROTEUS has eight types of parameterization schemes: planform, wing surface, twist, body surface, body scaling,...