Computation and Modeling of Insect Flight
Abstract
Here are some of the highlights in our three year's work supported by this grant: 1) New lessons from a dragonfly flight, namely, designing flapping flight at low Reynolds number need not follow the traditional rule, but instead, could make use of drag as well as lift. 2) Two new Navier-Stokes codes for efficiently simulating multiple wings and ground effects. 3) Experiments of dragonfly flight provided data to our computational models and study the dragonfly's fore-hind wing interactions. 4) Experiments, computation, and theoretical analysis of passive flight of falling paper and plates taught us about models of fluid forces. 5) Comparison of 2D computations against 3D robotic fruit fly experiments allow us to assess the relevance of 2D computations as well as the role of 3D effects in insect hovering. 6) Theoretical analysis of fluid forces including the effect of both the leading and trailing edge vortex sheets, a much needed improvement over the classical theory. 7) Simulations of three-dimensional elastic flapping wings that are actuated by muscle forces, which now finally takes off.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Aug 23, 2005
- Accession Number
- ADA437939
Entities
People
- Z. J. Wang
Organizations
- Cornell University