Meeting Abstract
During flight, insect wings undergo large, periodic deformations on each cycle due to the inertial and aerodynamic loads they experience. Various studies over the last decade have shown that such deformations can have a significant impact on increasing aerodynamic force and/or reducing aerodynamic power, enhancing flight performance. It is therefore beneficial for a flying insect not only to detect and control its body attitude but its wing aeroelastic state as well. Strains that result from aeroelastic loads are detected by campaniform sensilla near the wing base, and a variety of flow sensors capture aerodynamic features on the wing. While the degree of sensory innervation varies drastically across the insects, this form of mechanosensory feedback has been shown to provide important information for the flight controller in some species. In this study, we aim to generate predictions of the strain field across dragonfly wings using fluid-structure interaction (FSI) numerical simulation, where computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and computational structural dynamics (CSD) are coupled. Towards that goal, we constructed dragonfly forewing and hindwing morphology models based on X-ray microtomography (micro-CT) scans. Dynamically deforming flapping wing models are reconstructed based on multiple-camera, high-speed recording of dragonfly flights. Preliminary findings from the CFD and CSD simulations are presented.
