Bio-inspired flow control studies under gust and turbulence effect for next-generation Urban Air Mobility aircraft.

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This project aims to take advantage of the automatic response birds have inflight to turbulent flow regions. By applying how they respond to these perturbation, these adaptations can be implemented to urban air mobility (UAM) aircraft, which operate in cities which are highly turbulent regions. To begin this project we first need to understand how birds, and in our case flapping flyers, react to controlled gusts. By using equipment designed and produced by Swansea postgraduates, measured gust can be sent towards Pigeons. The gusts in question are regions of unsteady flow, which will artificially increase the birds angle of attack. This will force the bird to manoeuvre to get back into steady, unaccelerating level flight. This response will be measured using motion capture software's as well as slow motion visual cameras and all will be collected in a multitude of different combinations in order to capture the mechanisms flapping flyers use to correct themselves. All of the data will be post processed, especially motion capture, to gain a numerical values in order to understand the response of the Pigeons as well as comparative data when, in the future, protypes replicating will have statistics to compare with. Once we understand what mechanisms the Pigeons are using for flight we may want to run CFD models where we can test prototypes which will try and recreate what the Pigeons have already achieved. This would reduce cost as less prototypes are going to built and they will likely have a higher success rate. However, depending on the complexity of the simulations, it maybe more time efficient to only consult the theoretical aspects and manufacture more prototypes to be tested at Bay campus. We then want to put prototypes through the same conditions the Pigeons were under. This will prove that the prototypes share the same gust rejection or not, and with faster speeds available in the wind tunnel at Bay, we will be able to see, to what extent the gust rejection learnt from the pigeons is applicable to.