Resonance and propulsion performance of a heaving flexible wing

By S. Michelin, S. G. Smith. 2009

244 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The influence of the bending rigidity of a flexible heaving wing on its propulsive performance in a two-dimensional imposed parallel flow is investigated in the inviscid limit. Potential flow theory is used to describe the flow over the flapping wing. The vortical wake of the wing is accounted for by the shedding of point vortices with unsteady intensity from the wing’s trailing edge. The trailing-edge flapping amplitude is shown to be maximal for a discrete set of values of the rigidity, at which a resonance occurs between the forcing frequency and a natural frequency of the system. A quantitative comparison of the position of these resonances with linear stability analysis results is presented. Such resonances induce maximum values of the mean developed thrust and power input. The flapping efficiency is also shown to be greatly enhanced by flexibility.

Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Computational Mechanics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/030fb56fd78bbc30280cd4f180e27506453f9676

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In Aerospace Engineering

In Computational Mechanics

Citations in the corpus

Recent progress in flapping wing aerodynamics and aeroelasticity (2010, result): “Similar conclusions were made in another study [241] wherein, the influence of resonance on the performance of a chordwise flexible airfoil prescribed with pure plunge motion at its leading edge was studied.”
Piezoelectric coupling in energy-harvesting fluttering flexible plates: linear stability analysis and conversion efficiency (2011, methodology): “The free wake vorticity is not solved for explicitely as in the Vortex Sheet approach [11, 42] but it is instead imposed that the pressure discontinuity across the plate must vanish at both ends of the flexible plate ([p̂](0, t) = [p̂](1, t) = 0).”
Effects of flexibility on the aerodynamic performance of flapping wings (2011, background): “Michelin and Llewellyn Smith [30] used potential flow theory to describe the flow over a plunging flexible wing.”
Flapping and Bending Bodies Interacting with Fluid Flows (2011, background): “There is a developing body of work beginning to address just these kinds of questions (e.g., see Alben 2008a, Liao et al. 2003, and Michelin & Llewellyn-Smith 2009 for studies related to this review).”
Force production and asymmetric deformation of a flexible flapping wing in forward flight (2013, unknown): “In Zhu (2007) and Michelin and Llewellyn Smith (2009), an oscillatory plate at low angles of attack was used to study thrust production of the wing.”