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Drones and energy harvesting can learn from bat wings

Drones and energy harvesting can learn from bat wings

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By Wisse Hettinga



The air flow around ‘flexible’ bat wings create new insight for more efficient drones and energy harvesting

Researchers in the Unsteady Flow Diagnostics Laboratory in EPFL’s School of Engineering set out to study the aerodynamic potential of more flexible wings using an experimental platform with a highly deformable membrane made from a silicone-based polymer. They found that instead of creating a vortex, the air flows smoothly over the curved wings, generating more lift and making them even more efficient than rigid wings of the same size.

“Our experiments allowed us to indirectly alter the front and back angles of the wing, so we could observe how they aligned with the flow,” says Unsteady Flow Diagnostics Lab head Karen Mulleners. “Due to the membrane’s deformation, the flow wasn’t forced to roll up into a vortex; rather, it followed the wing’s curvature naturally without separating, creating more lift.”

Gehrke says that the team’s results provide important insights for engineers. “We know that bats hover and that they have deformable membrane wings. How the wing deformation affects the hovering performance is an important question, but doing experiments on live animals is not trivial. By using a simplified bio-inspired experiment, we can learn about nature’s fliers and how to build more efficient aerial vehicles,” he said.

As drones get smaller, they are more strongly affected by small aerodynamic perturbations and unsteady gusts than larger vehicles like airplanes. Standard quadrotor drones stop working at a very small scale, so one solution could be to use the same flapping wing motions as animals to build improved versions of these flyers that can hover and carry a payload more efficiently.

The team’s findings could also be used to upgrade existing energy technologies like wind turbines, or to commercialize emerging systems like tidal harvesters that passively harness energy from the ocean’s currents. Advances in sensors and control technology, potentially combined with artificial intelligence, could enable the precise control required to regulate the deformation of flexible membrane wings and adapt the performance of such flyers to varying weather conditions or flight missions … more

www.epfl.ch

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