Computational aerodynamics of low Reynolds number plunging, pitching and flexible wings for MAV applications

Micro air vehicles (MAV’s) have the potential to revolutionize our sensing and information gathering capabilities in environmental monitoring and homeland security areas. Due to the MAV’s’ small size, flight regime, and modes of operation, significant scientific advancement will be needed to create this revolutionary capability. Aerodynamics, structural dynamics, and flight dynamics of natural flyers intersects with some of the richest problems in MAV’s, including massively unsteady three-dimensional separation, transition in boundary layers and shear layers, vortical flows and bluff body flows, unsteady flight environment, aeroelasticity, and nonlinear and adaptive control are just a few examples. A challenge is that the scaling of both fluid dynamics and structural dynamics between smaller natural flyer and practical flying hardware/lab experiment (larger dimension) is fundamentally difficult. In this paper, we offer an overview of the challenges and issues, along with sample results illustrating some of the efforts made from a computational modeling angle.