Bat Wing Structure and the Aerodynamic Mechanisms of Flapping Flight

飞行是最常见的动物运动方式，1200多种蝙蝠、1万多种鸟类和100多万种飞行昆虫都使用飞行。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了解相当有限。例如，长期以来，人们一直认为蝙蝠的翅膀产生升力的方式与人类设计的飞机相同。最近的研究表明，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经历巨大的形状变化。深入理解蝙蝠飞行的两个主要障碍是缺乏关于蝙蝠翅膀机械上独特的骨骼、皮肤和肌肉的信息，以及人类科学家同时考虑许多复杂数据流的能力有限，例如翅膀运动、空气速度和骨骼弯曲程度。布朗大学的一个跨学科研究团队将对蝙蝠翅膀的特殊材料进行第一次详细的机械测试，并记录蝙蝠在飞行过程中骨骼弯曲和皮肤拉伸的程度。这些结果将被新的计算机可视化工具解释，这些工具将把3D虚拟现实带出游戏世界，进入科学研究。这个项目的一个更广泛的影响将是培训和指导一些来自生物、工程和计算机科学的本科生和研究生。他们将在团队教员开发的新的跨学科课程的帮助下，学习如何有效地合作。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，在确定未来可用于构建微型自主飞行器等新技术的生物设计特征方面将取得进展。

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.