Abstract
The mobility and maneuverability of winged insects have been attracting attention, but the knowledge on the behavior of free-flying insects is still far from complete. This paper presents a computational study on the aerodynamics and kinematics of a free-flying model fruit-fly. An existing integrative computational fluid dynamics (CFD) framework was further developed using CUDA technology and adapted for the free flight simulation on heterogenous clusters. The application of general-purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPU) significantly accelerated the insect flight simulation and made it less computational expensive to find out the steady state of the flight using CFD approach. A variety of free flight scenarios has been simulated using the present numerical approach, including hovering, fast rectilinear flight, and complex maneuvers. The vortical flow surrounding the model fly in steady flight was visualized and analyzed. The present results showed good consistency with previous studies.
Highlights
Winged insects were the first animals to evolve flight locomotion
The computational fluid dynamics (CFD) scheme presented in the last section was adopted here to resolve the flow field surround the flapping wing flyer, in order to model the aerodynamic forces from the pressure and viscous stress acting on the flyer surfaces
Considering the wall-time elapsed during one complete FSI iteration, the advantage of graphics processing unit (GPU) acceleration is more impressive when the grid size is large, due to the computational bottleneck caused by the singular value decomposition (SVD) procedure executing on CPUs
Summary
Winged insects were the first animals to evolve flight locomotion. It is common to find them hovering, flying sideways, landing up-side down, and executing rapid changes in flight speed and direction. Gao et al [4] investigated the motion of a model fruit fly with six degrees of freedom based on CFD computation, and simulated passive dynamic motions of the flyer under small perturbation. They argued that an active control with sufficiently fast response is needed to maintain the stability of the flight under disturbance. An emerging heterogeneous computing technique that performs massive parallelization on graphics processing unit (GPU) This technology is designed to achieve high float point operation rates and is suitable for acceleration of numerically intensive CFD computations. We adopted the NVIDIA CUDA technology to accelerate the simulation of a free flying insect model and investigated its long-term behaviors in different flight scenarios
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