Coupled piezoelectric fans with two degree of freedom motion for the application of flapping wing micro aerial vehicles

Abstract

a b s t r a c tPiezoelectric fans consisting of a piezoelectric layer and an elastic metal layer were prepared by epoxy bonding and a coupled flexible wing was formed by a pair of carbon fibre reinforced plastic wing spars and polymer skin attached to two piezoelectric fans. Two sinusoidal voltages with phase differences were then used to drive the coupled piezoelectric fans. High speed digital cameras were used to characterize the two degree of freedom (DOF) motion of the wing and these results were compared to finite element model of the wing and the coupled piezoelectric fans. It has been observed that the phase delay between the driving voltages applied to the coupled piezoelectric fans plays an important role in the control of the flapping and twisting motions of the wing and this set-up has the potential for application to the control of flapping wings for micro aerial vehicles.

Aerodynamic damping of sidewall bounded oscillating cantilevers

“…One of the major hurdles associated with applications such as thrust generation (Aureli et al, 2010a;Cen and Erturk, 2013;Chung et al, 2008;Eastman et al, 2012) or convection enhancement (Acikalin et al, 2004(Acikalin et al, , 2007Kimber and Garimella, 2009) is designing an enclosure within which the vibrating beam is mounted, such that the performance is either unaffected or enhanced. Understanding the effect of the enclosure walls on the oscillatory behavior of the beam is an essential first step in generating guidelines for such designs.…”

Nonlinear dynamic analysis of dragonfly-inspired piezoelectric unimorph actuated flapping and twisting wing

“…Several researchers have used the piezofan as the actuator for flapping wing mechanisms. Chung et al [28] placed two coupled piezofans in parallel and applied sinusoidal voltages with a different phase delay between them to control the flapping and twisting motions of the wing. Their experimental investigation showed that the bending amplitude of the wing reduced with increasing phase delay and the twisting movement increased with an increasing phase delay.…”

A comparative study of dragonfly inspired flapping wings actuated by single crystal piezoceramic

“…Pizofan was also used in flapping wing applications by several researchers. Chung et al (2008) used two coupled piezofans in their experiments and showed that the bending amplitude of the wing reduced with the increasing phase delay and the twisting movement increased with an increasing phase delay. In another study, selection of the best piezofans for flapping wing MAV applications based on design optimization was proposed by Chung et al (2009).…”