An Integrated Program to Simulate the Multibody Dynamics of Flapping Flight

Abstract

This paper presents an in-house developed program that couples multibody dynamics and aerodynamics codes to simulate flapping flight of insects and micro air vehicles. The multibody dynamics code is built based on the numerical solution of the Lagrange equation, while the extended unsteady vortex-lattice method is employed to develop the aerodynamics code. The solution from the governing equation is obtained by the use of the fourth-order Runge-Kutta method and validated against the simulation results from a commercial software MSC Adams for a micro air vehicle model. In this work, parallel computing techniques are applied while estimating the aerodynamics force to minimize the running time of the program.