Thursday 20 December 2012

Engineer Looks to Dragonflies, Bats for Flight Lessons


Dec. 13, 2012 — Ever since the Wright brothers, engineers have been working to develop bigger and better flying machines that maximize lift while minimizing drag.

There has always been a need to efficiently carry more people and more cargo. And so the science and engineering of getting large aircraft off the ground is very well understood.

But what about flight at a small scale? Say the scale of a dragonfly, a bird or a bat?

Hui Hu, an Iowa State University associate professor of aerospace engineering, said there hasn't been a need to understand the airflow, the eddies and the spinning vortices created by flapping wings and so there haven't been many engineering studies of small-scale flight. But that's changing.

The U.S. Air Force, for example, is interested in insect-sized nano-air vehicles or bird-sized micro-air vehicles. The vehicles could fly microphones, cameras, sensors, transmitters and even tiny weapons right through a terrorist's doorway.

So how do you design a little flier that's fast and agile as a house fly?

Hu says a good place to start is nature itself.

And so for a few years he's been using wind tunnel tests and imaging technologies to learn why dragonflies and bats are such effective fliers. How, for example, do flapping frequency, flight speed and wing angle affect the lift and thrust of a flapping wing?


No comments:

Post a Comment

You only need to enter your comment once! Comments will appear once they have been moderated. This is so as to stop the would-be comedian who has been spamming the comments here with inane and often offensive remarks. You know who you are!

Related Posts with Thumbnails

ShareThis