Twist Morphing Effect on Propulsive Performance of Bio-Inspired Pitching-Rolling Plates

摘要

The present paper focuses on the effect of twist morphing on pitching-rolling plate performance. Previous studies have shown that through adding twisting around mid-span can reduce wake deflection angle and improve propulsive efficiency [1, 2, 24]. It is hypothesized that adding dynamic twist morphing to the plate can help reduce the deflection angle and adjust the wake direction, which leads to efficiency enhancement. In this paper, seven cases with twisting amplitude angles ranging from 0° to 180° (arithmetic progression with 30°) are simulated and analyzed. All the cases are based on a baseline case with no surface morphing but only pitching and rolling with amplitudes of 30° and 90°, respectively. The simulation result gives a better overview of the way twist morphing influences low aspect ratio pitching-rolling plate's thrust coefficient, power coefficient and wake structure. A twist morphing amplitude of 120 is also found to optimize the propulsive efficiency in this paper.