Effect of flexibility on flapping wing characteristics in hover and forward flight

Wing flexibility affects the flight performance of flapping-wing micro air vehicles. In this paper, we present a computational approach for the aeroelastic analysis of realistic insect-like flexible flapping wings with hovering and forward-flight modes. A three-dimensional preconditioned Navier-Stokes solver is used with a deforming mesh technique for the aerodynamic analysis of a flapping wing. For the structural analysis, co-rotational (CR) finite elements and CR shell elements are used. As seen from the numerical analysis, wing flexibility leads to thrust increments with the increasing flapping frequency. The advance ratio, however, is the cause of the thrust decrease for flexible flapping wings with high flapping-frequency motions.