Bat Wing Structure and the Aerodynamic Mechanisms of Flapping Flight

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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.