The simulations of underwater implosion, aerodynamics of flexible flapping-wing micro air vehicles, aeroelastic tailoring of racing cars, and high-G maneuvers of fighter aircraft share the challenge of computing fluid-structure interactions in highly nonlinear multi-material domains. Indeed, the implosive collapse of a submerged, gas-filled structure and its subsequent effect on the structural ...

The purpose of this research is to model and control a dragonflylike flapping wing micro aerial vehicle (FWMAV). It is well known that micro aerial vehicle (MAV) designs can be classified as fixed wing, rotary wing and flapping wing. Fixed wing MAV is capable of fast forward flight, which is suitable for flying outdoor. Rotary wing MAV is suitable for movement at low speed. Recently, flapping w...

This paper describes the design of dragonfly-inspired robots. Dragonflies demonstrate unique and superior flight performances than most of the other insect species. They are equipped with two pairs of independently controlled wings. The high level of dexterity in wing motion of the dragonfly allows it to hover, fly fast forward, make turns rapidly, fly sideways, and even glide. A dragonfly-insp...

Dragonfly wings are highly corrugated, which increases the stiffness and strength of the wing significantly, and results in a lightweight structure with good aerodynamic performance. How insect wings carry aerodynamic and inertial loads, and how the resonant frequency of the flapping wings is tuned for carrying these loads, is however not fully understood. To study this we made a three-dimensio...

Manoeuvring flight in animals requires precise adjustments of mechanical power output produced by the flight musculature. In many insects such as fruit flies, power generation is most likely varied by altering stretch-activated tension, that is set by sarcoplasmic calcium levels. The muscles reside in a thoracic shell that simultaneously drives both wings during wing flapping. Using a genetical...

This paper presents simulations of unsteady flow past a plunging airfoil using the highorder spectral difference (SD) method. Both third-order and fourth-order SD methods are used on unstructured quadrilateral grids. The vortex shedding pattern of an airfoil in an oscillating plunge motion becomes asymmetric at a sufficiently high frequency. The SD method is able to capture this effect and reve...

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...

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...

THERE is a growing interest in the aerospace community in the development of robotic micro aerial vehicles (MAVs) to learn and mimic avian flight. MAVs fly in low-Reynolds-number regimes of 10 to 10, which corresponds to that of small birds or bats [1]. MAVs with wings equipped with multiple degrees of freedom such as flapping, wing twist, and sweep provide greater payload capability than insec...