Soap Film Visualization of a 10 cm-Span Flapping Wing

Abstract

Flapping wing micro-air-vehicles (FWMAVs) animate the small-space dexterous flight, hovering, and energy-saving characteristics of birds and insects, and are believed to have enlightenment for the development of bionic flight in the future. When designing FWMAVs, detailed unsteady aerodynamic information is required. Besides the computational fluid mechanics (CFD) technology study, the flow visualization is also needed to assist this research. This article innovatively used soap film visualization with high-speed photography to record two kinds of the 2D flow fields laterally and longitudinally, respectively, generated by a flapping wing of 10 cm span. Different from the qualitative comparison of soap film imaging with the conventional smoke tracing method, the subsequent processing of the soap film images was demonstrated. This work explains how to quantify the soap film imaging into lift and thrust forces, and the corresponding results are compared with the wind tunnel force measurement data preliminarily.