A maple seed falls in a characteristic helical motion. A crude analogy with autorotation of a wind turbine suggests that the torque due to the aerodynamic force would initiate the gyration of the seed. We were therefore surprised that a seed with a torn wing gyrates in a similar manner as a full-winged seed. In fact, a seed with only a sliver of leading edge can still gyrate. Thus the gyrating motion appears not to fully depend on the aerodynamic force. If, on the other hand, the aerodynamic force is completely absent, a seed would fall from rest like a rock in a vacuum.To investigate how the seed reaches its steady helical motion, we use a high-speed digital camera to film the intact and cut seeds at 1000 Hz. With a mirror, the camera records two views simultaneously so that we can extract the 3D kinematics of the wing. We tracked the centre of mass and quantified the descending speed, the azimuthal rotation, and the cone angle for seeds with wings of different shapes. We found that the initial transition from rest to a steady gyration occurs in three steps: a tumble about the span-wise direction, followed by a tilt towards the vertical axis, leading to the gyration about the vertical axis and an opening of the cone angle before settling into a steady state. We offer a new explanation for the cause of the auto-gyration that accounts for these three stages.

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Falling parallelograms exhibit coupled motion of autogyration and tumbling, similar to the motion of falling tulip seeds, unlike maple seeds which autogyrate but do not tumble, or rectangular cards which tumble but do not gyrate. This coupled tumbling and autogyrating motion are robust, when card parameters, such as aspect ratio, internal angle, and mass density, are varied. We measure the three-dimensional (3D) falling kinematics of the parallelograms and quantify their descending speed, azimuthal rotation, tumbling rotation, and cone angle in each falling. The cone angle is insensitive to the variation of the card parameters, and the card tumbling axis does not overlap with but is close to the diagonal axis. In addition to this connection to the dynamics of falling seeds, these trajectories provide an ideal set of data to analyze 3D aerodynamic force and torque at an intermediate range of Reynolds numbers, and the results will be useful for constructing 3D aerodynamic force and torque models. Tracking these free falling trajectories gives us a nonintrusive method for deducing instantaneous aerodynamic forces. We determine the 3D aerodynamic forces and torques based on Newton-Euler equations. The dynamical analysis reveals that, although the angle of attack changes dramatically during tumbling, the aerodynamic forces have a weak dependence on the angle of attack. The aerodynamic lift is dominated by the coupling of translational and rotational velocities. The aerodynamic torque has an unexpectedly large component perpendicular to the card. The analysis of the Euler equation suggests that this large torque is related to the deviation of the tumbling axis from the principle axis of the card.