Tightly Coupled CFD/Multibody Analysis of Flapping-Wing Micro-Aerial Vehicles

This work presents the coupling of a multibody dynamics analysis to vortex lattice and incompressible and compressible Navier-Stokes solvers for the analysis of flapping wing micro-aerial vehicles. Complex structural models, based on original nonlinear beam and shell formulations, describe the dynamics of the structure. Unsteady fluid-dynamics analyses of increasing complexity describe the flow field and the interactional loads. The verification of the analysis, and its validation by correlation with data from the open literature are presented.

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