Bat flight inspired design for Micro Air Vehicle
Researchers from the Uni of Southampton have designed innovative membrane wings inspired by bats, paving the way for a new breed of unmanned Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs) that have improved aerodynamic properties, can fly over long distances and are more economical to run. The wings work like artificial muscles, changing shape in response to the forces they experience and have no mechanical parts, making MAVs incorporating them easier to maintain.
The unique design of the wings incorporates electro-active polymers that makes the wings stiffen and relax in response to an applied voltage and further enhances their performance. By changing the voltage input, the shape of the electroactive membrane and therefore aerodynamic characteristics can be altered during flight. The proof of concept wing will eventually enable flight over much longer distances than currently possible.
Wind tunnel testing of the membrane
Sometimes as small as 15cm across, MAVs are increasingly used in civil and military applications, such as surveying remote and dangerous areas. One emerging trend is to draw inspiration from the natural world to achieve better flight performance and that offer similar levels of controllability to small drones but use the efficiency provided by wings to fly much further. The team mimicked physiology of bats – the only type of mammal naturally capable of genuine flight. To inform and speed up the design process, the Imperial team built innovative computational models and used them to aid the construction of a test MAV incorporating ‘bat wings’.
The Southampton team incorporated some of these findings into a 0.5m-wide test vehicle, designed to skim over the sea’s surface and, if necessary, land there safely. After extensive wind tunnel testing, the vehicle was put through its paces at a nearby coastal location. The next step is to incorporate the active wings into typical MAV designs, with deployment in real-world applications over the next 5 years.
“This is a paradigm shift in the approach to MAV design. Instead of a traditional approach of scaling down existing aircraft design methods, we constantly change the membrane shape under varying wind conditions to optimise its aerodynamic performance,” said Dr Rafael Palacios of Imperial’s Department of Aeronautics, who led Imperial’s aspect of the project. http://www.southampton.ac.uk/news/2016/02/bat-mav.page
Recent Comments