Multi-physics simulation of an insect with flapping wings

Abstract

In this paper, the unsteady aerodynamic of an insect’s forward flight has been carried out with a novel approach. In order to fully utilize the available powerful solvers, an innovative intermediary MATLAB code has been written for the high-fidelity time-resolved multi-physics problems involving fluid flow and multi-body simulations. For simulating the insect’s flight, the FLUENT solver has been utilized to determine aerodynamic forces and moments of the wings and main body while ADAMS software has been employed to calculate translational and angular velocities. Overset grid technology accompanied with dynamic mesh method have been implemented for the movement of the insect. The code is responsible for the synchronization of the solvers at the end of each time step as well as the integration of the solutions. Three different simulations are done for two different insects’ geometries. For the first and second simulations, a simplified geometry of an insect is selected, due to the ease of manufacturing and testing. At first, all rotational and translational degrees of freedom are considered to be free. The motion path history shows the instability due to an inappropriate location of the center of gravity. Hence, in the second case, it is assumed that the insect’s main body is limited to the vertical motion. In the final simulation, a complicated model of a bee with exact geometry and wings kinematics extracts from the experimental data with the free translational degrees of freedom. According to the results, combining multiple software in which they can interact with each other at each time step, is the most accurate way for doing precise multi-physics simulations.

Numerical investigation of compressible flow around nose cone with Multi-row disk and multi coolant jets

“…It is observed that the average deviation of our data with other works is less than 6%. Validation of computational studies have been done in several previous works [45][46][47][48][49][50][51][52][53][54][55] Figure 4 displays the flow stream and concentration of the coolant gas (He and CO 2 ) for injection system released from the tip of disk located on the spike. As expected, the formation of the circulations in the cavity is main flow physic of the proposed configurations.…”

Influence of non-uniform magnetic field on the thermal efficiency hydrodynamic characteristics of nanofluid in double pipe heat exchanger

“…This study tries to visualize the impacts of the non-uniform source of magnetic field on the heat transfer performance of shell and tube heat exchangers. Although this type of heat exchanger is the most convenient one and has been widely investigated [31][32][33][34][35] , the performance of this type under the impact of the non-homogenous magnetic field was not fully discussed.…”

A modified unsteady-nonlinear aeroelastic model for flapping wings

“…where n is the number of assumed modes. It should be noted that, even though, substitution of equation (11) in equation (10) results in a nonlinear displacement equation in terms of generalized coordinates, the nonlinear terms are only responsible for implicit condensation of the membrane modes and do not cover nonlinear effects in large amplitude deformations. The mentioned claim is based on the utilized assumption that T m contains the eigenvectors of membrane modes.…”

“…1 Due to importance and inherent complexities associated with FAVs, there are some researches focused on its aerodynamic aspects. [2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12] On the other hand, flexibility is another significant issue with FAVs that can [13][14][15][16][17][18] potentially affect their aerodynamic loadings for sustained flights.…”