Golden Ratio-Based and Tapered Diptera Inspired Wings: Their Design and Fabrication Using Standard MEMS Technology

This work presents our understanding of insect wings, and the design and micromachining of artificial wings with golden ratio-based and tapered veins. The geometric anisotropy of Leading Edge Veins (LEVs) selected by Diptera has a function able to evade impact. As a Diptera example, the elliptic hollow LEVs of cranefly wings are mechanically and aerodynamically significant. In this paper, an artificial wing was designed to be a fractal structure by mimicking cranefly wings and incorporating cross-veins and discal cell. Standard technologies of Microelectromechanical Systems (MEMS) were employed to materialize the design using the selected material. One SU-8 wing sample, light and stiff enough to be comparable to fresh cranefly wings, was presented. The as-prepared SU-8 wings are faithful to real wings not only in weight and vein pattern, but also in flexural stiffness and mass distribution. Thus our method renders possible mimicking with good fidelity of natural wings with complex geometry and morphology.