Birds Give a Lesson to Plane Designers

Roland Piquepaille points out a news release from the University of Michigan where researchers are looking to birds and bats for insights into aerospace engineering. Wei Shyy and his colleagues are learning from solutions developed by nature and applying them to the technology of flight. A presentation on this topic was also given at the 2005 TED conference. From the news release: "The roll rate of the aerobatic A-4 Skyhawk plane is about 720 degrees per second. The roll rate of a barn swallow exceeds 5,000 degrees per second. Select military aircraft can withstand gravitational forces of 8-10 G. Many birds routinely experience positive G-forces greater than 10 G and up to 14 G. Flapping flight is inherently unsteady, but that's why it works so well. Birds, bats and insects fly in a messy environment full of gusts traveling at speeds similar to their own. Yet they can react almost instantaneously and adapt with their flexible wings."

Comments

Re:Missing tag.

[calebt3]

***Warning: Hearsay below***

Apparently once upon a time all articles submitted by Roland linked to his blog which linked to the real article (as a way to generate ad revenue, I think). And he continues to take flak for it to this day.
Like I said, this is second-hand from earlier discussions. I was not here when it was happening.

Re:Missing tag.

[amorsen]

Considering that the laws of physics scale uniformly with size (as long as we're talking about objects bigger than a molecule and smaller than a planet) this shouldn't matter. Where do you get this junk from? Mass increases cubically when wing area increases quadratically (and wing span increases linearly).

Were an enormous 11,000kg unladen swallow to exist, it should exhibit pretty much the same characteristics as the 10g swallow, with a slight penalty for increased air resistance. With the slight difference that the 11,000kg swallow would not be able to stand up, much less fly.

Re:It's the people, not the planes.

[vbraga]

Enhancing Aircraft Conceptual Design using Multidisciplinary Optimization, by Dan Raymer.

[PDF] http://www.aircraftdesign.com/RaymerThesisFinalRevLowRes.pdf

Genetic algorithms are a pretty useful stuff, and already in use within aircraft design.