Development of flapping wing aerial vehicle
(FWAV) has been of interest in the aerospace community with ongoing research
into unsteady and low Reynolds number aerodynamics based on the vortex lattice
method. Most of the previous research has been about pitching and plunging
motion of the FWAV. With pitching and flapping motion of FMAV, people usually
study it by experiment, and little work has been done by numerical calculation.
In this paper, three-dimension unsteady vortex lattice method is applied to
study the lift and thrust of FWAV with pitching and flapping motion. The results
show that: 1) Lift is mainly produced during down stroke, however, thrust is
produced during both down stroke and upstroke. The lift and thrust produced
during down stroke are much more than that produced during upstroke. 2) Lift
and thrust increase with the increase of flapping frequency; 3) Thrust
increases with the increase of flapping amplitude, but the lift decreases with
the increase of flapping amplitude; 4) Lift and thrust increase with the increase
of mean pitching angle, but the effect on lift is much more than on thrust.
This research is helpful to understand the flight mechanism of birds, thus
improving the design of FWAV simulating birds.
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