Aeroelastic optimization of flap-gliding micro air vehicle wings

Flap-gliding flight mode can effectively combine aerodynamic advantages of fixed wing and flapping wing, which is commonly adopted by large bird species. Inspired from it, a kind of flexible flap-gliding Micro Air Vehicle was successfully designed and manufactured. In order to make flight more efficient during accomplishing the flight mission, it is urgent to find an optimized configuration of the flap-gliding wing. The aeroelastic responses of a membrane wing subjected to unsteady inertial and aerodynamic forces are dominated by elastic and mass distribution of the underlying skeletal reinforcement. Based on a new flap-gliding model, the aeroelastic models for both flapping flight and gliding flight are simulated by coupling a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code and a structural dynamic code. A surrogate-based approach is applied to search the global optimized combination of structural parameters. The optimized results provide an overall understanding of the key relationships between the skeletal aeroelastic behaviors and the energetic cost of flap-gliding flight.