Aerodynamics, structural dynamics, and flight dynamics of birds, bats, and insects intersect with some of the richest problems in aerospace engineering: massively unsteady three-dimensional separation, transition in boundary layers and shear layers, vortical flows and bluff-body flows, unsteady flight environment, aeroelasticity and anisotropic wing structure, and nonlinear and adaptive control are just a few examples. The large flexibility of animal wings leads to complex fluid-structure interactions, and the kinematics of flapping and the often spectacular maneuvers performed by natural flyers result in highly coupled aerodynamics, structural dynamics, navigation, and control systems. The agility and flight performance of natural flyers is of particular interest to the aerospace community from the viewpoints of both fundamental engineering science and the development of miniaturized flight vehicles. For all of the maturity of aerodynamics as an engineering discipline, our understanding of flight in natural flyers presently stands far from complete. Recent years have seen a tremendous rise in interest in the aerodynamics of animal flight and in the aerodynamics of man-made flight vehicles at the scale of birds or insects. Causes include interest in the so-called micro or nano unmanned air vehicles (MAVs and NAVs) capable of performing missions of interest to military, urban security, environmental monitoring, and human curiosity; increase in the capabilities of the enabling experimental and computational methods; the trend toward more first-principles-based investigation in biology; the miniaturization of flight hardware components such as servos and power plants; and advances in materials and battery technologies.
展开▼
