A wireless, in-situ ultrasonic guided wave structural health monitoring (SHM) system has been developed and tested for aircraft wing inspection. It applies small, low cost and light weight piezoelectric (PZT) disc transducer network to the structural surface, and embeds a miniaturized diagnostic device for data collection and analysis. The whole system can be powered by an energy harvesting dev...

Miniature flapping flight systems hold great promise in matching the agility of their natural counterparts, bees, flies, and hummingbirds. Characterized by reciprocating wing motion, unsteady aerodynamics, and the ability to hover, insect-like flapping flight presents an interesting locomotion strategy capable of functioning at small size scales and is still a current focus of research. A vehic...

Many studies investigating the ecology and evolution of mosquitoes rely on morphometric measurements related to body size to estimate fecundity. Determining the most reliable estimators of fecundity is therefore an important methodological consideration. We compared the relative accuracy of pupal mass and wing length in predicting the fecundity (number of mature stage IV follicles of the first ...

Flapping wing micro-aerial vehicles (MAVs) hold great potential for matching the agility of flies, their source of inspiration. At small scales, however, it becomes difficult to balance design mechanical complexity and the weight/lift ratio. Considering control in the initial stages of vehicle design can help define system feasibility and the consequences of making design simplifications. Here,...

Insect wings appear to have evolved from gills used by aquatic forms for ventilation and swimming, yet the nature of intermediate stages remains a mystery. Here a form of nonflying aerodynamic locomotion used by aquatic insects is described, called surface skimming, in which thrust is provided by wing flapping while continuous contact with the water removes the need for total aerodynamic weight...

Asynchronous Parallel Evolutionary Algorithms (HAPEAs) have shown to be robust as they require no derivatives or gradients of the objective function, have the capability of finding globally optimum solutions amongst many local optima, can be executed asynchronously in parallel and adapted easily to arbitrary solver codes without major modifications. The application of the methodology is illustr...

This work provides a feasibility and effectiveness analysis, through numerical investigation, of metal replacement primary components with composite material for an executive aircraft wing. In particular, benefits disadvantages replacing metal, usually adopted to manufacture this structural component, are explored. To accomplish task, detailed FEM model the wing was deployed by taking into acco...

Abstract High-fidelity multidisciplinary design optimization (MDO) promises rigorous balancing of the trade-offs inherent to aircraft wings. However, collaborations between academia and industry rarely put MDO test on practical problems. In this work, is applied a regional jet wing minimize fuel burn. aerostructural analysis used model capture structural weight aerodynamic performance. A novel ...

In this paper, we present the ®rst MEMS-based wing technology that we developed using titanium-alloy metal (Ti±6Al±4V) as wingframe and poly-monochloro-para-xylylene (parylene-C) as wing membrane. With this new MEMS wing technology, we are able to produce light, but robust 3-D wings, optimized to utilize the ̄ow separation to achieve a high lift coef®cient as large as ®ve times that of the ®xed...

Design of complex high-tech systems typically requires an integrated analysis of the multiple interacting physical phenomena that jointly influence the overall system’s behaviour. For aircraft wings, for example, the aerodynamic loading and the wing structural deformation strongly interact, with their balance determining the overall wing behaviour. This balance must be evaluated for the differe...