Aerodynamic Interaction Effects of wingtip-Mounted Propellers

Study of Potential Aerodynamic Benefits From Spanwise Blowing at Wingtip

Stochastic Flights of Propellers

Kilometer-sized moonlets in Saturn’s A ring create S-shaped wakes called “propellers” in surrounding material. The Cassini spacecraft has tracked the motions of propellers for several years and finds that they deviate from Keplerian orbits having constant semimajor axes. The inferred orbital migration is known to switch sign. We show using a statistical test that the time series of orbital long...

The aerodynamic effects of wing-wing interaction in flapping insect wings.

We employed a dynamically scaled mechanical model of the small fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster (Reynolds number 100-200) to investigate force enhancement due to contralateral wing interactions during stroke reversal (the ;clap-and-fling'). The results suggest that lift enhancement during clap-and-fling requires an angular separation between the two wings of no more than 10-12 degrees . Within...

Assessing the aerodynamic effects of tail elongations

Of the three species of Hirundine that breed sympatrically across the U.K., one, the 23 barn swallow, has outer tail feathers elongated into streamers, whereas the other two species, the 24

Aerodynamic effects of flexibility in flapping wings.

Recent work on the aerodynamics of flapping flight reveals fundamental differences in the mechanisms of aerodynamic force generation between fixed and flapping wings. When fixed wings translate at high angles of attack, they periodically generate and shed leading and trailing edge vortices as reflected in their fluctuating aerodynamic force traces and associated flow visualization. In contrast,...