Bat Wing Structure and the Aerodynamic Mechanisms of Flapping Flight

飞行是动物运动中最常见的模式，超过1200种蝙蝠，10，000种鸟类和超过100万种飞行昆虫使用。 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，已经证明蝙蝠翅膀的空气动力学与刚性翅膀的空气动力学非常不同，并且蝙蝠翅膀在飞行期间经历巨大的形状变化。 深入了解蝙蝠飞行的两个主要障碍是缺乏关于蝙蝠翅膀独特的骨骼，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的能力有限，例如翅膀运动，空气速度和骨骼弯曲程度。 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，并记录蝙蝠骨骼弯曲和皮肤在飞行过程中伸展然后反冲的程度。 这些结果将由新的计算机可视化工具解释，这些工具将把3D虚拟现实从游戏世界中带出来，并进入科学研究。该项目的更广泛的影响之一将是培训和指导来自生物学，工程学和计算机科学的一些本科生和研究生。 他们将学习有效地协同工作，由团队教师开发的新的跨学科课程的帮助。 可视化技术在自然科学中有着广泛的应用。 此外，还将在确定未来可用于构建小型自主飞行器等新技术的生物设计特征方面取得进展。

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.