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Corresponding Author

Sameh, Ahmed

Subject Area

Production Engineering and Mechanical Design

Article Type

Original Study

Abstract

When dealing with a conventional aircraft, the design must be based on simplification assumptions, such as a cruising flight or a trimmed flight condition, which requires aircraft to have forces and moments equilibrium with respect to the center of gravity without any continuous control efforts. However, in case of ornithopters, there is no such equilibrium point due to the continuous flapping wing motion during the cruising flight. Therefore, this paper introduces a new methodology to obtain trimmed flight condition for a small flapping wing air vehicle. This methodology is based on applying initial impulsive forces to the air vehicle in such a way that the flapping wing air vehicle reaches almost constant flight speed after removing the initial impulsive forces. This enables the designer to examine the design parameters of the vehicle during realistic flight performance. A refined aerodynamic model programmed with MATLAB® is integrated into a flapping vehicle model using efficient multi body dynamics software MSC.ADAMS® to test the system. The results show perfect trimmed flight condition for a flapping wing air vehicle that never presented before in the literature.

Keywords

Flapping flight; Multi-body dynamics; Flight simulation; MSC.ADAMS®; Trim condition

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