Analysis of forward propulsion in Flapping Membrane

Human have always been fascinated by the birds and always tried to replicate their flight. Birds can take off with zero runway distance via their wings. In the early days people tried to mimic bird’s wing structure to develop flying vehicles but due to lack of sufficient power source and light weight material their designs failed. Later the wright brothers made their first successful flight using airfoil wing design. This flight needs a long runway to take off. Today with the development of high density energy sources such as lithium ion battery and high voltage capacitors as well as light weight high strength composite material it is now possible to mimics bird’s flight.

In the Stokesian realm, Reynolds number is much less than 1, viscous forces dominate. Organisms generally use non reciprocal drag based propulsion, such as oar based, cilliary and flagellar motion. Whereas, for the Eulerian realm, Reynolds number is greater than 10, flapping motions are observed among flying and swimming organisms.

As per the concept of “Vortex Shedding” motion of an object or wing (membrane) in one direction can provide drags/propulsion in perpendicular direction at certain frequency or more precisely certain range Reynolds numbers. In this study we tried to study the dependence of frequency and strength of vortex shedding on various parameters of the wings (membrane).