Multi-physics simulation of an insect with flapping wings

Abstract

In this paper, the unsteady aerodynamic of an insect’s forward flight has been carried out with a novel approach. In order to fully utilize the available powerful solvers, an innovative intermediary MATLAB code has been written for the high-fidelity time-resolved multi-physics problems involving fluid flow and multi-body simulations. For simulating the insect’s flight, the FLUENT solver has been utilized to determine aerodynamic forces and moments of the wings and main body while ADAMS software has been employed to calculate translational and angular velocities. Overset grid technology accompanied with dynamic mesh method have been implemented for the movement of the insect. The code is responsible for the synchronization of the solvers at the end of each time step as well as the integration of the solutions. Three different simulations are done for two different insects’ geometries. For the first and second simulations, a simplified geometry of an insect is selected, due to the ease of manufacturing and testing. At first, all rotational and translational degrees of freedom are considered to be free. The motion path history shows the instability due to an inappropriate location of the center of gravity. Hence, in the second case, it is assumed that the insect’s main body is limited to the vertical motion. In the final simulation, a complicated model of a bee with exact geometry and wings kinematics extracts from the experimental data with the free translational degrees of freedom. According to the results, combining multiple software in which they can interact with each other at each time step, is the most accurate way for doing precise multi-physics simulations.