Humans have been fascinated by ability of birds and insects to fly and have always wanted to replicate these creatures to earn their rightful place among them in the sky. Over the years there have been many scientists who have tried to understand these marvels of nature.
The most famous among them was the ‘artista’, Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci;in the year 1485 he designed a flapping wing aircraft after doing through research on the birds. The objective of this project to understand the physics behind the different modes of bird flight and to do numerical two dimensional simulations of pure plunging, pure pitching and combined pitch plunging motion of an aerofoil.
First, the different physical models used to understand the generation of thrust are explained. Then the numerical model used for the simulation is explained briefly. Then the results and analysis of the numerical simulations are presented.
Source: KTH
Author: Aishwar, Ravichandran