Micro air vehicles promise to play an important part in public, private, and military arenas in the coming years. Small, lightweight, agile, and inexpensive, these flying machines are of interest in domestic search-and-rescue operations, law enforcement, reconnaissance, mapping, and urban combat operations. Nature demonstrates that flapping wings are an extremely effective solution to the problem of hovering flight with good agility in close quarters. However, the highly unsteady, largely separated character of the flow complicates aerodynamic analysis of these vehicles, and these challenges are magnified in a design setting when the sensitivities to many geometric and kinematic parameters must be assessed. In this paper, computational fluid dynamics simulation is applied as a means to evaluate kinematic parameters of flapping wings for a four-wing, dragonfly-like micro air vehicle. It is shown that high-frequency, moderate-amplitude flapping is preferred for wings flapping in a vertical stroke plane, and increasing the feathering rotation angle also has a positive effect on performance. Comparisons have been made with horizontal-stroke-plane hovering, identifying potential benefits of this configuration, and interactions between wings are also evaluated.
Computational Approaches to Design and Analysis of Small-Scale Flapping Wings
2016
Aufsatz (Zeitschrift)
Englisch
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