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.

飞行是动物最常见的运动方式，超过1200种蝙蝠、10000种鸟类和100多万种飞行昆虫都采用飞行方式。因此，令人惊讶的是，对力学、空气动力学和进化的理解是相当有限的。例如，人们一直认为蝙蝠的翅膀产生升力的方式与人类制造的飞机相同。最近有研究表明，蝙蝠翅膀的空气动力学与刚性翅膀有很大的不同，蝙蝠翅膀在飞行过程中会发生巨大的形状变化。深入了解蝙蝠飞行的两个主要障碍是缺乏关于蝙蝠翅膀的独特骨骼、皮肤和肌肉的机械信息，以及人类科学家同时考虑许多复杂数据流（如翅膀运动、空气速度和骨骼弯曲程度）的有限能力。来自布朗大学的一个跨学科研究小组将对蝙蝠翅膀的特殊材料进行首次详细的机械测试，并记录蝙蝠在飞行过程中骨骼弯曲、皮肤伸展和后缩的程度。这些结果将通过新的计算机可视化工具来解释，这些工具将把3D虚拟现实从游戏世界带入科学研究。该项目的一个更广泛的影响将是培训和指导一些来自生物学、工程学和计算机科学的本科生和研究生。他们将学习如何有效地合作，并辅以新的跨学科课程，这些课程将由团队教师开发。这里开发的可视化技术将在自然科学中有广泛的应用。此外，将在确定生物设计特征方面取得进展，这些特征可用于未来的新技术建设，如小型自主飞行器。