Aerodynamic Characterization of a Wing Membrane with Variable Compliance

Curet, Oscar; Carrere, Alex; Waldman, Rye M.; Breuer, Kenneth S.

doi:10.2514/1.j052688

Cited by 50 publications

(29 citation statements)

References 30 publications

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“…Research on heterogeneous wings has appeared more recently [85,64,63,82,17,48,47,66]. The majority of these studies focus on insect flight and, more specifically, simulating the coupled aeroelastic dynamics of compositionally complex wings [64,63,82,66].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A fast Chebyshev method for simulating flexible-wing propulsion

Moore¹

2017

Journal of Computational Physics

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We develop a highly efficient numerical method to simulate small-amplitude flapping propulsion by a flexible wing in a nearly inviscid fluid. We allow the wing's elastic modulus and mass density to vary arbitrarily, with an eye towards optimizing these distributions for propulsive performance. The method to determine the wing kinematics is based on Chebyshev collocation of the 1D beam equation as coupled to the surrounding 2D fluid flow. Through small-amplitude analysis of the Euler equations (with trailing-edge vortex shedding), the complete hydrodynamics can be represented by a nonlocal operator that acts on the 1D wing kinematics. A class of semi-analytical solutions permits fast evaluation of this operator with O (N log N ) operations, where N is the number of collocation points on the wing. This is in contrast to the minimum O N 2 cost of a direct 2D fluid solver. The coupled wing-fluid problem is thus recast as a PDE with nonlocal operator, which we solve using a preconditioned iterative method. These techniques yield a solver of nearoptimal complexity, O (N log N ), allowing one to rapidly search the infinite-dimensional parameter space of all possible material distributions and even perform optimization over this space.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A fast Chebyshev method for simulating flexible-wing propulsion

Moore¹

2017

Journal of Computational Physics

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“…The aerodynamic efficiency of membrane wings is found to be restricted in comparison to rigid flat plates due to higher drag penalties (Timpe et al, 2013;Galvao et al, 2006;Bleischwitz et al, 2015b). Recent attempts focused on active control of membrane wing performance by the use of electroactive membranes, allowing to gain control over mean camber adjustment or even modulating membrane vibrations (Curet et al, 2014;Hays et al, 2012). However, this challenging concept would add large electro-mechanic complexity in a MAV structure and most likely comes with a payload penalty.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Aeromechanics of membrane and rigid wings in and out of ground-effect at moderate Reynolds numbers

Bleischwitz

Kat

Ganapathisubramani

2016

Journal of Fluids and Structures

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Wind tunnel experiments are conducted using membrane wings and rigid flat-plates in ground-effect at a moderate Reynolds number of Re = 56,000 with ground clearances from 1% to 200% chord length measured from their trailing-edge. A six-axis load-cell captures time-resolved forces and moment while time-resolved stereo digital image correlation (DIC) measurements are performed to capture membrane motions. The lift and drag coefficients of the rigid wing in ground-effect follow well-established trends while the membrane wing appears to exhibit improved coefficients and efficiency (compared to the rigid wing) when in ground-effect. Proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) is applied to study the spatiotemporal structure of membrane vibrations. With increasing angles-ofattack and/or decreasing heights above ground, mode shapes of membrane deformation are dominated by large-scale fluctuations that have a smaller number of local extrema along the chord. Ground-effect induces modifications to the membrane deformation, which appear to be similar to the modifications induced by increasing angles-of-attack in free-flight. At high angles-of-attack in free-flight or at moderate angles in ground-effect, two POD modes of membrane fluctuations are found to be sufficient to capture 90% of all membrane deformations. Under these conditions, a membrane deformation with maximum camber near the trailing edge of the membrane wing is found to correlate with high lift, low drag and a nose down pitching moment. The extrema in membrane deformations and lift and drag forces occur simultaneously, while there is a time-lag between the deformation and the pitching moment.

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“…Hays et al (2013) showed large lift control capability due to camber shape change under static voltage loads. Curet et al (2014) showed further control enhancements when the sinusoidal voltage excitation exploited the resonant frequencies of the coupled system. On the numerical side, Hays et al (2013) used a numerical model for the membrane structure to postprocess the experimental results and estimate membrane stresses and thickness but, to date, only Buoso and Palacios (2015) and Buoso and Palacios (2016) have developed an electro-aeromechanical model coupling high-fidelity descriptions of both fluid and structural domains.…”

Section: S Buoso Et Almentioning

confidence: 93%

Bat-inspired integrally actuated membrane wings with leading-edge sensing

2017

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This paper presents a numerical investigation on the closed-loop performance of a two-dimensional actuated membrane wing with fixed supports. The proposed concept mimics aerodynamic sensing and actuation mechanisms found in bat wings to achieve robust outdoor flight: firstly, variable membrane tension, which is obtained in bats through skeleton articulation, is introduced through a dielectric-elastomer construction; secondly, leading-edge airflow sensing is achieved with bioinspired hair-like sensors. Numerical results from a coupled aero-electromechanical model show that this configuration can allow for the tracking of prescribed lift coefficient signals in the presence of disturbances from atmospheric gusts. In particular, disturbance measurements through the hair sensor (a feedforward control strategy) are seen to provide substantial advantage with respect to a reactive (feedback) control strategy determining a reduction of the oscillations of the lift coefficient.

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Aerodynamic Characterization of a Wing Membrane with Variable Compliance

Cited by 50 publications

References 30 publications

A fast Chebyshev method for simulating flexible-wing propulsion

A fast Chebyshev method for simulating flexible-wing propulsion

Aeromechanics of membrane and rigid wings in and out of ground-effect at moderate Reynolds numbers

Bat-inspired integrally actuated membrane wings with leading-edge sensing

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