Achieving reliability and validity of predicted aerodynamic performance of flapping wings for micro air vehicle (MAV)

There does not exist any paper in the open literature concerning theoretical prediction of aerodynamic performance of MAV flapping wings by using strip treory. We now present a method for theoretically predicting such performance using the strip theory. When applying strip theory, we make some modifications to make it suitable for MAV. In the paper, we first summarize briefly Delaurier's strip theory and then explain in detail its application to calculating effectively a set of aerodynamic characteristics of MAV flapping wings. In this abstract, we just add some pertinent remarks to listing the following four topics of explanation: (1) the Delaurier's strip theory; (2) experiments and analysis; (3) the analysis of aerodynamic characteristics; (4) software design. We used the Delaurier's strip theory to calculate the aerodynamic parameters of flapping wings. Wind tunnel tests were performed in the special MAV wind tunnel of Northwestern Polytechnical University and these test results show preliminarily the reliability and validity of strip theory as applied to the calculation of the aerodynamic performance of MAV flapping wings. We compared the aerodynamic characteristics of different plane shapes, different aspect ratios, and different ratios of up to down flapping time and the results of comparison are given, which prove helpful to the MAV designer for making MAV stay longer in air and its payload larger. The computational software was developed by using Fortran/Visual Basic mixed programs.