Bat Wing Structure and the Aerodynamic Mechanisms of Flapping Flight

蝙蝠翼结构与扑动飞行的气动机制

• 批准号: 0723392
• 负责人: Sharon Swartz
• 金额: $ 27.93万
• 依托单位: Brown University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2007
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2007-09-01 至 2010-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0723392&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Bat; Wing; Structure; Aerodynamic; Mechanisms

Flight is the most common mode of animal locomotion, used by over 1200 species of bats, 10,000 birds, and more than a million species of flying insects. It is thus surprising that understanding of the mechanics, aerodynamics, and evolution of biological flight is quite limited. For example, it was long believed that the wings of bats generate lift in the same way as human-engineered airplanes. Recently, it has been demonstrated that the aerodynamics of bat wings are very different from those of rigid wings, and that bat wings undergo enormous shape changes during flight. Two major impediments to in-depth understanding of bat flight are lack of information about the mechanically unique bone, skin, and muscle of bat wings, and the limited ability of human scientists to consider many complex streams of data, such as wing motions, air velocities, and degree of bone bending, together at one time. An interdisciplinary team of researchers from Brown University will carry out the first detailed mechanical tests on the special materials of bat wings, and document the degree to which bat bones bend and skin stretches then recoils during flight. These results will be interpreted by novel computer visualization tools that will bring 3D virtual reality out of the gaming world and into scientific research. One of the broader impacts of this project will be the training and mentoring of a number of undergraduate and graduate students from biology, engineering, and computer science. They will learn to work together effectively, aided by new interdisciplinary courses that will be developed by team faculty. Visualization techniques developed here will have broad application in the natural sciences. Additionally, progress will be made toward identifying biological design characteristics that can be used in the future for the construction of novel technologies such as miniaturized autonomous air vehicles.

飞行是动物运动的最常见模式，由1200多种蝙蝠，10,000只鸟和超过一百万种飞行昆虫使用。 因此，令人惊讶的是，对生物飞行的力学，空气动力学和进化的理解非常有限。 例如，长期以来，人们一直认为，蝙蝠的翅膀以与人工工程飞机相同的方式产生升力。 最近，已经证明，蝙蝠机翼的空气动力学与刚体翅膀的空气动力学有很大不同，并且蝙蝠的机翼在飞行过程中发生了巨大的形状变化。 对蝙蝠飞行的深入了解的两个主要障碍是缺乏有关机械独特的骨骼，皮肤和肌肉的信息，以及人类科学家一次考虑许多复杂数据流的能力有限，例如机翼运动，空气速度和骨骼弯曲程度，一次。 来自布朗大学的研究人员的跨学科团队将对蝙蝠机翼的特殊材料进行首次详细的机械测试，并记录蝙蝠骨头弯曲和皮肤伸展的程度，然后在飞行过程中退缩。 这些结果将通过新颖的计算机可视化工具来解释，这些工具将使3D虚拟现实从游戏世界中脱颖而出并进入科学研究。该项目的更广泛影响之一是培训和指导生物学，工程和计算机科学的许多本科生和研究生。 他们将学会在团队教师开发的新的跨学科课程的帮助下有效合作。 此处开发的可视化技术将在自然科学中具有广泛的应用。 此外，将在识别未来可以使用的生物设计特征方面取得进展，以构建新型技术，例如微型自动驾驶汽车。