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Writing Sample I - Nature and Aerodynamics

Pritam Sukumar May 31, 2011


The following appeared as on online post on my blog It requires very little thought to realize that birds have inuenced aircraft design very strongly. The solutions for the problems of airfoil design, wing shape, fuselage design and tail placement to name a few, can all be traced back to the answers provided by birds. However, birds and aircraft dier very fundamentally on one basic characteristics almost (all?) birds y by apping their wings while almost no aircraft do. The rst imaginings of human ight and also the rst attempts, were based on apping wings. This of course led to disaster. Human arms are nowhere near as strong (relative to body weight and size) as the wings of birds. Leonardo da Vinci had very interesting ideas about ight and his drawings in fact resemble very closely the gliders and helicopters of today. Of course, he did not publish his results and hence nobody knew of these till after the helicopter was independently developed. The basic idea of apping wings is to have a single mechanism for both propulsion and the generation of lift (the force that counters the weight of the body in order to y). Helicopters are kind of similar, but that issue is for a separate post. Aircraft on the other hand have xed wings for lift generation and engines for propulsion. This arrangement is in general more ideal for the purposes of aircraft ight: More ecient for high speeds: Having an engine allows for very high speeds since the engine can be designed for the thrust required and the design of the wing is (sort of) independent of this requirement. There is no bird that can y at Mach 3! Lower loads: The material strength required by xed wing aircraft is lower since the loads on the aircraft are not increased by increasing the power provided by the engine. On the other hand, apping faster exerts large loads on the wing root (the point where the wing is attached to the bird). Complexity: The mechanical design of a xed wing is much simpler than a apping wing. Most motors are designed with rotary shafts which are naturally suited to engines while the rotary motion has to be converted via complicated linkages to a apping motion if that is what is required. 1

All is not bad however, in the land of apping wings. Low Reynolds Number : At small aircraft sizes (wing spans of less than 3 m), where the Reynolds number (a measure of the amount of resistance in the form of friction that the air has to the motion of the aircraft) is very small, it turns out that apping wings are more ecient. This is because lift and drag (the force that resists the force of the engine) are strongly dependent on the friction between the wing and the air. The lower the friction, the lower the drag. This is not as simple as Im making it out to be and there might be a separate post on Reynolds numbers soon. The important point is that apping is that apping is more ecient for smaller wing spans. No wonder birds are much smaller than aircraft then! Agility: At even smaller aircraft sizes (think insects and hummingbirds), apping oers far greater agility provided the frequency of apping is really high. The hummingbird, for example can ap at more than 50 beats per second. It can accelerate and stop rapidly, jumping from ower to ower while hovering seemingly eortlessly while it feeds. Diculty of natural propeller design: Though apping is the way to go for very small aircraft, there exists a large overlap between birds and current aircraft where the separate-wing-and-engine is clearly more ecient. The problem for evolution is that no design was presented to it that allowed for an arrangement of bones that could rotate around an axis. Thus, propeller design was kind of excluded naturally. Evolutionary considerations: Its not that apping wings are not optimal even for the intermediate spans that I just mentioned above. They are just optimized (well, if you can call evolution optimization) for a dierent purpose. Fixed wing aircraft dont have to fold their wings, go back into their nest and feed their young every day.

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