Aves are an incredibly diverse class of animals, ranging greatly in size and thriving in a wide variety of environments. Here, we explore the scaling trends of bird wings in connection with their flight performance. The tensile strength of avian bone is hypothesized to be a limiting factor in scaling the humerus with mass, which is corroborated by its experimentally determined allometric scaling trend. We provide a mechanics analysis that explains the scaling allometry of the wing humerus length, LH, with body weight W, LH ∝ W0.44. Lastly, wing feathers are demonstrated to generally scale isometrically with bird mass, with the exception of the spacing between barbules, which falls within the same range for birds of all masses. Our findings provide insight into the “design” of birds and may be translatable to more efficient bird-inspired aircraft structures.
展开▼
机译：Aves是种类繁多的动物，大小各异，并且在各种各样的环境中蓬勃发展。在这里，我们探讨了鸟翅膀的缩放趋势及其飞行性能。禽骨的抗张强度被认为是按比例缩放肱骨质量的限制因素，这一点通过其实验确定的异速结垢趋势得到了证实。我们提供了力学分析，解释了机翼肱骨长度LH随体重W的缩放变长法，LH ∝ W 0.44 。最后，证明了翼羽通常与鸟类成比例地按比例缩放，除了鳞茎之间的间距，对于所有质量的鸟类来说，间距都在相同范围内。我们的发现为鸟类的“设计”提供了见识，并且可以转化为更有效的鸟类启发的飞机结构。
展开▼
