UC Irvine

The subject of flapping flight has been studied extensively for more than a century. Flapping flight, throughout the years, has been observed to have different thrust, lift, and moment characteristics that make this phenomenon very efficient when compared to conventional aircraft. This work is a step towards developing a novel flying concept: a quad-flapping drone. An experimental setup was built to measure these different characteristics of a 4-winged flapping mechanism that include lift, drag, pitching moment, and rolling moment. These characteristics made us determine how the clapping effect can be of use to FWMAV (flapping wing micro air vehicles). A second part of this work is the determination of an optimum design point (frequency) in which the mechanism will operate at. This will help in the sizing process of the quad-flapping drone. Lastly, an estimation of the beating angle was put forth by using the hall effect sensor raw data. It was found that the effect of the clapping effect increases with frequency. Also, that the thrust cycle of our FWMAV includes two thrust peaks; one corresponding to the leading-edge vortex, and other is due to clapping. The optimal design point was found by taking the average thrust and power per cycle, nondimensionalizing each term to get the coefficients, and then obtaining C_T/C_(P ) to get the optimal point. This experiment was done for different areas. It was found that the efficiency increases as the area increases, which is a great result in the sense that higher areas can be of more thrust and the difference in weight would not be great, since the weight of the flapping wing is very small.