A Lagrangian Approach to Capture the Unsteady Aerodynamics of Insect-Like Flapping Flight

Abstract

A Lagrangian viscous vortex technique is used in the present study to simulate the unsteady flow field of flapping flight. The method is grid free and computations are done only at the regions of non-zero vorticity. As a result this method is quite suitable for simulating the unsteady vertical flow-field past flapping wings and airfoils; it provides an accurate and fast flow-visualization. The main strength of this tool is its grid free nature; as the resolution of the grid is a crucial parameter in resolving the unsteady flow-field accurately. It is also relatively easy to implement a grid-free particle based technique for a moving boundaries or complex geometries. In this algorithm, field property vorticity is carried by discrete particles which convects with the Biot-Savart velocity and diffuses with random walk.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Sep 09, 2010
Accession Number
ADA528712

Entities

People

  • Sunetra Sarkar

Organizations

  • Indian Institute of Technology Madras

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Air Platforms
  • Autonomy
  • Energy and Power Technologies
  • Human Systems

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Aircrafts
  • Algorithms
  • Boundary Layer
  • Computational Fluid Dynamics
  • Computations
  • Flow
  • Flow Fields
  • Fluid Dynamics
  • Fluid Flow
  • Fluid Mechanics
  • Micro Air Vehicles
  • Reynolds Number
  • Stratified Fluids
  • Three Dimensional
  • Two Dimensional
  • Unsteady Aerodynamics
  • Unsteady Flow

Fields of Study

  • Physics

Readers

  • Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD)
  • Fluid Mechanics and Fluid Dynamics.