New experiments offer insight into how insects fly and how to design tiny flying robots

The secrets of a bug's flight
The left image represents a non-rotating wing in the presence of incident flow; it exhibits a stalled state. The right image, taken shortly after the onset of rotation (at 36 degrees), shows a stable, lift-generating flow structure. Credit: Matthew Bross

Researchers have identified some of the underlying physics that may explain how insects can so quickly recover from a stall in midflight鈥攗nlike conventional fixed wing aircraft, where a stalled state often leads to a crash landing.

The analysis, in which the researchers studied the flow around a rotating model wing, improves the understanding of how fly and informs the design of small flying robots built for intelligence gathering, surveillance, search-and-rescue, and other purposes. The work is described in the journal 麻豆淫院ics of Fluids.

An insect such as a fruit fly hovers in the air by flapping its wings鈥攁 complex motion akin to the freestyle stroke in swimming. The wing rotates in a single plane, and by varying the angle between the plane and its body, the insect can fly forward from a hovering position.

To simulate the basics of this action, Matthew Bross and colleagues at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, PA, studied how water flows around a rotating model wing consisting of a rectangular piece of acrylic that is twice as long as it is wide. The is off to the side of the wing and parallel to its width, so that it rotates like half of an airplane propeller. To simulate forward motion鈥攁 scenario in which the insect is accelerating or climbing鈥攖he researchers pumped water in the direction perpendicular to the plane of rotation.

"We were able to identify the development of flow structure over an insect-scaled wing over a range of forward flight velocities," Bross explained. The researchers made detailed three-dimensional computer visualizations of the flow around the wing, finding that a leading-edge vortex鈥攁 feature crucial for providing lift鈥攁lmost immediately appears once the starts to rotate after a stalled state.

More information: The article, "Flow structure on a rotating wing: effect of steady incident flow," by Matthew Bross, Cem Alper Ozen and Donald Rockwell appears in the journal 麻豆淫院ics of Fluids:

Journal information: 麻豆淫院ics of Fluids

Citation: New experiments offer insight into how insects fly and how to design tiny flying robots (2013, November 12) retrieved 6 July 2025 from /news/2013-11-insight-insects-tiny-robots.html
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