Abstract
Flapping wing micro-air-vehicles (FWMAVs) animate the small-space dexterous flight, hovering, and energy-saving characteristics of birds and insects, and are believed to have enlightenment for the development of bionic flight in the future. When designing FWMAVs, detailed unsteady aerodynamic information is required. Besides the computational fluid mechanics (CFD) technology study, the flow visualization is also needed to assist this research. This article innovatively used soap film visualization with high-speed photography to record two kinds of the 2D flow fields laterally and longitudinally, respectively, generated by a flapping wing of 10 cm span. Different from the qualitative comparison of soap film imaging with the conventional smoke tracing method, the subsequent processing of the soap film images was demonstrated. This work explains how to quantify the soap film imaging into lift and thrust forces, and the corresponding results are compared with the wind tunnel force measurement data preliminarily.
Highlights
Flapping wing micro-air-vehicles (FWMAVs) or ornithopters has certain advantages such as low-speed cruising, high operational and power efficiency
As flow visualization analysis is important to understand the unsteady aerodynamics and the design optimization of FWMAVs, how to develop the flow visualization technique to investigate the unsteady flow feature of flapping wings is one of the crucial issues that should be taken into consideration
This paper aims to investigate the 2D flow field around a 10 cm-wingspan FWMAV by interacting with the soap films along the longitudinal and lateral directions, respectively
Summary
Flapping wing micro-air-vehicles (FWMAVs) or ornithopters has certain advantages such as low-speed cruising, high operational and power efficiency. It excels in hovering [1,2,3,4], low-speed flight, narrow-space movement [5], short-field take-off and landing [6]. For modifying the soap film visualization to a quantitative method, the relationship between the color (soap film thickness) fields and the corresponding thrust and lift induced by the flapping wing are firstly derived, and later verified using image processing with the experimental results in this work. The developed technique is shown to record the unsteady lift behavior of a flapping wing in a quantitative manner with low cost and without any dangerous concern
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