Potential Flow in Flapping Wing Aerodynamics

Abstract

Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs) have gained a large popularity and have seen potential for military purposes such as information gathering and hostile environment sensing. Although inspired by the biological dynamics of flapping wings, the wing kinematics, geometry and structure are very sensitive to the flight conditions, hence an understanding of those gives a more efficient approach at capturing the subtle design space. As far a human flapping wing flight is concerned it is still an elusive goal. Advances have been made and a lot was done through experimentation and computer aided simulations. So far it appears that experimentation has dominated the theoretical approach in which there is not yet a complete mathematical model that describes this sort of complex kinematics implicitly, and that is one barrier that must be overcome. This is where potential flow offers a low-fidelity mathematical model that will aim to describe such motion and capture the forces generated.