This paper describes the design and development of the Dove, a flapping-wing micro air vehicle (FWMAV), which was developed in Northwestern Polytechnical University. FWMAVs have attracted international attentions since the past two decades. Since some achievements have been obtained, such as the capability of supporting an air vehicle to fly, our research goal was to design an FWMAV that has the ability to accomplish a task. Main investigations were presented in this paper, including the flexible wing design, the flapping mechanism design, and the on-board avionics development. The current Dove has a mass of 220 g, a wingspan of 50 cm, and the ability of operating fully autonomously, flying lasts half an hour, and transmitting live stabilized color video to a ground station over 4 km away.
The flexibility of flapping-wing strongly affects the aerodynamic performance of Flapping-wing Micro Air Vehicle (FMAV), and the deformations in span-wise and chord-wise directions are coupled together in flight. In this study, the flexible deformation is formulated in span-wise and chord-wise separately in order to analyze its effects on aerodynamic behavior. The preconditioned Navier-Stokes equations based on chimera grid are used in the computational fluid dynamics method to study the aerodynamic effects caused by flexible deformation, and the simulation results are compared with experimental test to illustrate the capability of above method. Based on our results, it is clearly showed that the span-wise flexible deformation should be limited in a small range to achieve higher aerodynamic performance and the chord-wise deformation could enhance the aerodynamic performance. The results also suggest that FMAV designers should design the flapping-wing with high stiffness leading edge to limit the span-wise deformation, and more flexible chord ribs to keep chord-wise deformation in suitable range.FMAV, flexible flapping-wing, Navier-Stokes equations, chimera grid, span-wise deformation, chord-wise deformation
Citation:Yang W Q, Song B F, Song W P, et al. The effects of span-wise and chord-wise flexibility on the aerodynamic performance of micro flapping-wing.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.