warmth Aerospace engineer Aimy Wissa prepares to fly a remote-controlled plane on a summer morning at Helipad University. But it’s not just any model aircraft. Wissa and her team carefully connected three rows of thin, soft plastic flaps on top of the top of the wings and articulated them with tape.
The 1.5-meter-wide aircraft, under the guidance of a mini-flying computer, was repeatedly tested – lifting its nose until it lost its lift and became unstable, a situation called this situation Stall. As data flows in from the aircraft’s onboard sensors, Wissa observed that with these flaps, the occurrence of stalls gradually occurs and only when the aircraft’s nose is at a higher angle. The flaps prevent a sudden drop in lift and improve overall stability.
The experiment was inspired by the original master of the air: birds. A few years ago, in his graduate class at Princeton University, Visa stumbled upon a video of a giant flying through the wind. She noticed the small feathers popping up in unusual ways under the bird’s wings. Unlike simplifying the larger outline and flying feathers of birds’ bodies, these secret feathers are smaller, softer and arranged in layers, such as overlapping shingles on the roof. They tend to stay flat during normal flights, but when the bird turns quickly or lands, these secret feathers are slightly raised, helping to control the turbulence of the birds.
“Can we use the same elements that make birds fly so agile and maneuverable to improve our engineering systems,” said Girguis Sedky, one of Wissa’s former students, who now works as an aerospace engineer at Exponent, a California-based engineering consulting firm. Although stalling or loss of control causes relatively few air crashes, especially in commercial aviation, they can be catastrophic. Pilot errors, mechanical problems, and turbulence can all cause the aircraft to stall or lose control and fall from the sky.
By investigating the functionality of multi-row cloaking feathers and then replicating its effect using flexible, flexible plastic flaps, Wissa and her team have demonstrated that their bio-inspired design can improve aircraft stability and lay the foundation for future designs of full-scale aircraft. Unlike the traditional flleaperon on the wings of a mechanically controlled aircraft, the team’s flaps extend along the length of the wingspan and move freely in response to airflow without sensors or actuators, just like the secret feathers on bird wings. In Wissa’s model aircraft, when it encounters turbulent or high-angle attack angles, the flap automatically lifts, cleverly adjusting the airflow for enhanced stability and lift.
The team’s work is based on a rich but dormant tradition of drawing aviation inspiration from birds. In the late 15th century, Leonardo da Vinci began to outline aircraft inspired by the movement of bird wings. I saw it in the late 19th century Scientists like Otto Lilienthal A glider is built based on the bird wing shape. Lilienthal also wrote detailed case studies to understand how bird flights can be transformed into aviation, greatly affecting later engineers, including the Wright brothers. It is obvious why these early pioneers were so fascinated by birds. “As a person, if you can’t even see anything flying, how can you fly,” said David Lentink, an experimental biologist at the University of Gronagan in the Netherlands, who was not involved in the research.
But as time goes by, aerospace engineers begin to think they have exceeded the needs of nature. There are millions of flying insects, more than 1,400 species of bats, and more than 10,000 bird species, but most flying species have never been studied. “We may know their name, eggs or habitat that lay eggs, but we don’t know how they fly.” He believes that this is a huge missed opportunity because studying animal flight allows researchers to think outside the box. It can bring new perspectives on how animals encounter and adapt to new physical conditions during flight.
