Details of Insect Wing Design and Deformation Enhance Aerodynamic Function and Flight Efficiency

By John Young, S. Walker, R. Bomphrey, Graham K. Taylor, Adrian L. R. Thomas. Science, 2009

461 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Locust Wing Aerodynamics Insect wings function as deformable aerofoils, but the precise aerodynamic benefits of the observed deformations have remained obscure. Previous models have treated the wing as a flat plate, lacking any deformation, even though it is clear that the locust wing can twist and rotate along its length. Young et al. (p. 1549) validate a computational fluid dynamic model, using particle imaging velocimetry and smoke visualization of the flow around actual locusts, and use the model to investigate the effect of measured changes in wing shape during a stroke cycle. The complexity of insect wing venation directly affects the aerodynamics of flight via the intermediary of wing deformation. Measurements of locust wing kinematics validate a fluid dynamics model of the aerodynamic effects of wing deformation. Insect wings are complex structures that deform dramatically in flight. We analyzed the aerodynamic consequences of wing deformation in locusts using a three-dimensional computational fluid dynamics simulation based on detailed wing kinematics. We validated the simulation against smoke visualizations and digital particle image velocimetry on real locusts. We then used the validated model to explore the effects of wing topography and deformation, first by removing camber while keeping the same time-varying twist distribution, and second by removing camber and spanwise twist. The full-fidelity model achieved greater power economy than the uncambered model, which performed better than the untwisted model, showing that the details of insect wing topography and deformation are important aerodynamically. Such details are likely to be important in engineering applications of flapping flight.

Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Computational Mechanics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b5ea89ab831fb0e5f6589ca76bd0140c30ad63d6

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In Computational Mechanics

Citations in the corpus

Aeromechanics of passive rotation in flapping flight (2010, background): “Two- and three-dimensional computational fluid dynamics (CFD) calculations are an alternative to flapping experiments (Wang 2000; Wu & Sun 2004; Young et al. 2009).”
Recent progress in flapping wing aerodynamics and aeroelasticity (2010, background): “[121] conducted numerical investigations on a tethered desert locust called Schistocerca gregaria [118].”