Thrust, Flying, and Swimming

FFN: Week 9

Well, if I had a guess, I would guess that this is one of the topics that people
have

been waiting to see in some detail.

And it's a fairly sizable topic, thrust, flying, and swimming.

And so we're going to divide this, talk first about thrust and flying, and then
we'll save

swimming for a separate section, which follows this one.

I've split them just because this is a relatively long section.

Ah, you see a picture of geese flying here.

Geese are very good flyers, and we'll have a little bit more to say about that.

While I'm on the subject of geese in this area in Blacksburg, there are lots of
Canada

geese which no longer migrate.

That has become true all the way up and down the eastern coast of the
United States.

Less than half of the Canada geese now migrate north and south.

Ah, it might not surprise you then to know that the ones that don't migrate
grow bigger,

they don't expend as much energy obviously in the migration.

They become quite a pest in some areas.

One of the reasons is that they seem to prefer the grass on greens and golf
courses.

And this has gotten a lot of people aggravated, even people who are
probably anti-hunting

in general.
So it's kind of amusing since the geese poop on the greens and they get their
nice new

golf shoes, soiled.

A lot of folks have started now pushing for eliminating the geese.

And indeed in this area in Virginia there are two hunting seasons for geese.

One is the early season for non-migratory geese.

And that has more generous bag limits than does the later season which is
for the migratory

geese.

So it's a kind of a funny twist on modern culture and society.

So let's get to the next slide and just a couple of simple things here at first.

This is obviously an airplane.

And let's talk about Litteth and Drag.

We've been talking about that some.

We also need now to talk about weight and we've done a little bit of that.

But now we're going to focus on thrust.

And let's see what that looks like.

It's almost the same picture for a bird on slide number three.

The bird has a challenge.

I mentioned this earlier.

The bird has to produce enough Litteth to keep itself up, counteract the
weight.

At the same time the bird has to generate thrust in order to fly forward.

And the birds use the same mechanism, same device for this, both purposes
to generate

both lift and thrust.

And so that's what we need to talk about in order to try to make it clear
exactly how
does the bird fly.

And we'll see that most fish swim in a similar fashion even though that may
surprise you.

So let's go to slide number four.

Bird has wings obviously.

And we discussed quite a bit on how wings generate lift.

And hopefully now you see that.

It's not very complicated.

The question is how can we also generate thrust?

And the key notion here is that we have to add an additional component of
motion.

And one way to understand that I think quite easily is to think of the case of
the propeller.

The propeller adds the other component of motion obviously by rotation.

And so if we look at the sketches here on the left hand side of slide number
four first,

we see that there are airfoil sections.

And they differ as we go out along the span of the propeller blade.

And there's a couple of typical sections here, Mark DAA and BB.

And there's two main differences.

Obviously the cord might vary normally would.

And that's shown here in this picture.

Also the thickness varies.

And that's largely an issue having to do with strength.

So clearly we need a thicker section on the inboard part of the blade.

It's due to both bending forces and centrifugal forces.

That's not directly relevant here to the bird flight thing.

Although the bird's wing sections are also thicker on the inside as we saw
earlier.

But they don't have clearly centrifugal forces.

So that's one thing.

But the other thing, the blade twists a lot.

And you see that by comparing sections AA and BB on the right hand side of
figure nine

two here.

And that's because when we have a forward motions, in this case an

airplane,

the infinity is the same.

But the rotational component varies with the radial location for a given speed
of rotation

of the propeller.

And so we need to take both components into account and come up with an
effective relative

wind with respect to the propeller.

And so we have a little sketch on the bottom here of figure nine three.

So at any radial station you have a component due to R omega.

And then you have a component due to the forward motion of the airplane,
the infinity.

Normally in propellers at least the rotational component, unless we're very

near the hub,

is large compared to the forward speed of the airplane.

But in any event we take both components into account and we get the
effective component

of velocity approaching the airfoil section.

And we want to have this oriented correctly at some sensible angle of attack
to the local

airfoil section so that we produce efficient lift at small drag.

We don't want to, for example, have a high angle of attack at some stations
where we

would then produce separation install.

And so that's why the blade has to be twisted to take these things all into
account.

And this is illustrated, I think, pretty well in these couple of sketches here.

Okay now let's go to the figure on the right hand side of slide number four.

And this is now a little bit more detail of what's going on at a particular
section.

And this whole conversation now has to do with how we assemble or

disassemble the

components of the forces.

What we call lift, okay, will be perpendicular to the effective wind direction
and the drag

will be in the same direction as the wind, right?

So lift and drag are called out on the left hand side of that figure.

And then we can take the resultant force.

And that here is labeled as R. Now we can take the force R and decompose it
into components,

one of which is in the direction of motion and the other one is perpendicular
to it.

But we're most interested in the one which is in the direction of motion which
now is

the thrust.

Okay so what is the whole story here?

The whole story here is simply that we are taking into account the local wind
direction

that is section of this wing, I put wing in quotes here because obviously this
is a propeller

blade but it's acting locally like a wing.

And then we resolve all these force components and then look at is there a
component in the

direction of motion and the answer is yes we produce a thrust.

And then of course we have to provide in the case of the propeller here we
have to provide

torque from the motor in order to operate.

But we've seen now the key role of adding an additional component of
motion beyond

that of just the forward flight speed in this case of an airplane but in a couple
seconds

it's going to be the flight speed of the bird.

So that when we add this other component of motion then when we

decompose the forces

we can have forces in say hold the bird up and also to produce thrust.

So without any further delay now let's go to slide number five where this is
illustrated.

And I'm going to draw your attention now only to the top half of this slide
we'll return

to the hovering the humming bird it's a very interesting case but we'll return
to that later.

Okay this is a very nice figure from the hurdle book.

The only difficulty with it is that his notation for the forces and the
components of the forces

are pretty unusual from what we're used to thinking about.

But he is looking again at two sections of the wing of the flapping wing now
of the bird.

The bird adds the extra component of motion beyond just its forward speed
flying through

the air by flapping.

So let's look at the top part of the wing here and the top part of the figure on
slide
number five.

The most outboard section of the wing I meant to mention it.

Now on a typical propeller most of the forces produce somewhere around

70% of the radius.

And that's also true of the bird's wings most of the forces produced in the
outer most efficiently

in the outer sections.

Okay so let's follow now this almost looks like a sine curve here of the motion
of the

bird's wing as it is going forward and we have the flight speed and then we
are going

now to add in the stroke of the wing.

Now the bird in addition to what the propeller does the bird twists its wings
so that it

is going to be getting trying to produce not only lift but thrust not only on the
downstroke

but on the upstroke.

So let's start now and we start down this as I said roughly sine is so it will
looking.

I guess it's more like a cosine since it doesn't start at zero here in this
picture.

But now you will see he sketched here the little airfoil section and how it is
oriented.

At this place within the flapping stroke right and the bird twists this wing
section

such that it is oriented and he has this arrow the effective velocity
component is this v sub s

and the wing is oriented at some sensible angle of attack relative to that
velocity result

velocity and would produce a lift which he is now labeling here is A. What we
call lift
because it's perpendicular to the effective approach velocity of the air
stream.

However we want to orient this differently we want to now decompose that

lift into a

component which is in the direction of motion which he is labeling s so that's

like a thrust

for us and his h1 is what we would as far as keeping the bird up in the air we
would call lift.

So you see that the bird can get a pre substantial component of thrust.

Now let's follow along further down along in the trough and up start on the
other side

and now the wing is coming up and the bird has twisted his wing quite a bit
such that the wing

is oriented in a sensible way with respect to the effective approach velocity

component here again v sub s

and actually in this part of the stroke again you resolve you take the quote
lift which he labels

here is A is perpendicular to that effective approach velocity and now we

decompose it again

and we're producing a thrust. In this case however you notice that in this
part of the stroke we're

actually producing a negative lift in the sense of opposing the weight of the
bird

and then the bird does something similar for the inboard section he doesn't
show quite as much

detail here but he only shows it excuse me on the up stroke and you see in
this case actually

there is a slight negative component to the thrust but there's a fairly

substantial component

keeping the weight up. Obviously the hummingbird and we're going to look
at that a little harder
later has to really go through gyrations in order to beat around and keep
producing the same kind of

lift force not so concerned with what we would call thrust not trying to move
just trying to

hold himself up so that's a very different thing and let me direct your
attention back to the

top of this very nice figure from the hurdle book. Okay I have another set of
drawings that

have something in common with that on slide number six. I don't know the
the the bottom part of this

figure is perhaps not as useful it does show the the track of the the tips of
the wing

but again I think that the the parts which show the relative airfoil sections in
different parts

of the flapping motion are most helpful here so I direct your attention
primarily to those and

again this author has a in board section and an outboard section and he
actually

labels these perhaps a little more nicely rather than trying to just give them
symbols

so you have the flow due to the upbeat and you have the flow due to the
forward motion and then

we take these components and apply them to the local airfoil section and
then he's got

properly labeled here the lifting force which is perpendicular to that effective
approach velocity

that lifting force is not the force which is counteracting the weight and then
he doesn't show

them re-resolved now but you can sort of see that there's going to be thrust
and what have you

as well as drag sometime here now on the down stroke on the right hand
side of the top part of
this figure you can see this pretty nicely okay up flow due to the down beat
inflow due to forward

motioned and then an effective velocity component approaching these

sections

the rest of the slide I don't think has a big message for us right here rest of
this figure

actually okay let's to the next slide and this most this kind of interesting that
we're not

gonna talk a lot we don't have much time to talk about maneuvering but
these are very nice

pictures of the of a pigeon okay it's in slow flight and it's turning and so you
see it's going to a

lot of durations but these pictures do illustrate pretty nicely the twisting not
only flapping but

twisting motion we've seen now from trying to resolve these forces into a
force that helps

forward motion which we're calling thrust and at the same time a force which
opposes the weight

so let's look now at the slide number eight here's something about the wing
beat frequencies

and this is a fairly busy slide but he has again this is from this excellent book
by Azuma

and he's got body mass here and as we talked before we're talking about a
very large range of

sizes of creatures here from one milligram up to 10 kilograms and so this is a

log-log scale

and then he's got the wing stroke frequency and certainly what you get out
of this is that

as the flying creature gets bigger the wing stroke frequency goes down very
rapidly again that's a

log scale on the vertical axis and then as the creature gets smaller the
frequency goes up a lot
and this is why we hear mosquitoes and you see he's got mosquitoes on here
with very high pitched

frequent buzz when we when they're pestering us meanwhile a really large

bird has a very low

frequency of flapping and he's got on here some lines some trend lines to try
to give you some

idea of how these things behave he's got an exponent on there for you so a
big message out of this is

that the wing beat frequency goes down rapidly as the size expressed here in
terms of weight as

the size of the flying creature increases we're going to come back to insect
flight later it isn't

exactly the same as as here and i'm going to talk a little bit more about that
later in this section

all right let's move to slide number nine now we went to some trouble earlier
to discuss the vortex

pattern behind a lifting wing we we say that we imagine a bound vortex

within the wing

uh trailing vortices from the tips of the wings and then this system is closed
by a starting vortex

which we say is left back at the airport or left back at the bird's nest that's a
simplified picture

when we talk about birds because the bird is flapping so the wing is change
the the wing is changing

its position but it's also changing its lift at different net lift at different places
up and down

in the flapping motion and so what happens is in the simplest sense we

produce a series of starting

vortices and if the bird is flying relatively slowly then they appear as shown
in the sketch

on the left hand side of this figure on the left hand side of slide number nine
if the bird is
flying rapidly and beating its wings then these vortices tend to not up as
illustrated roughly in

this sketch here and we did see that the downstroke is somewhat more
effective at producing lift

over on the right hand side here we have a nice picture of a of a dragonfly in
a wind tunnel

the dragonfly is on us things support and it's flying away it's not moving of
course but it's moving

it thinks it's moving relative to the approaching wind

and then they have smoke visualization coming filaments smoke filaments
coming down

past us and you can see this periodic pattern of vortices of course they break
up the

the vortices don't stay so nice and neat in the wake of the dragonfly's body
and also

due to this kind of roll up and breakdown of vortices that that is sketched on
the left hand

side of this figure but you've got a fairly complicated pattern now as the

a bird or insect fairly sizable insect at least is flying along here so our

it's very the whole vertical pattern business is very very important we're
going to mention a

little bit of this again when we talk about unsteady flows and unsteady
phenomena directly

in a section towards the end of this course so let's move next to slide number
10

this is not an anatomy course or really a biology course but I thought I would
throw in a little

bit about the muscles which are used for flying and this is a rough sketch
obviously of an owl

um next plot here shows you the how much of the weight of a bird is actually
in the flight
muscles and again this is one of these big log log plots because we have a
big range from in

this case from hummingbirds up to storks and pelicans uh and the scale here
is in grams

but still a big range and then you see the percentage of the of the total
weight that is tied up in

flight muscles and you can also deduce that yourself if you look at the
comparison of the

vertical scale which is the flight muscles and then the horizontal scale which
is the total

muscles and you'll see that they group somewhere pretty nicely between 20
and 30 percent of the

weight of the bird is actually in flight muscles the smaller birds seem to have
a higher

percentage than the very largest birds but it's roughly somewhere around
this 20 30

value which is sizable okay let's go to slide number 12 and talk about bird
speeds

uh and this was a little little snippet I found in a magazine uh the purgant
falcon can go about

200 miles an hour in a in a dive they can really move and I'll come back to
that with another

little curiosity in a moment and it can kill a pigeon just by hitting them

uh level flight over 100 miles an hour 100 miles an hour of magansa is a kind
of a duck

heels are like 60 miles an hour uh from wild turkeys it's relevant to Virginia
Tech go about

55 miles an hour uh and they really move and this is an interesting challenge
if you're

do any kind of hunting safer let's say geese we don't have geese on this
particular thing
but the big birds have flapped their wings slowly as we saw earlier and this
gives you a perception

that they're not moving very fast it's sort of counterintuitive um and so a bird
like a turkey

you see it flapping its wings and sailing along and unless you are comparing
uh it's uh

how far it moves per unit time you get the perception perceptions excuse me
that these big birds are

moving slowly but believe me they they are not so a turkey and we don't
normally think of a turkey

as a particularly efficient flyer it is a ground bird uh prefers to stay on the

ground

but it can fly very very well okay let's go to slide 13 this is a little curiosity
about

peregrine falcon uh and uh talks about uh why doesn't the falcon have some
difficulty uh

with uh with breathing a couple hundred miles an hour and uh temp here is
to show that is

to claim at least that the falcon has a structure on its nostrils which is not too
dissimilar to the

inlet on a jet airplane which a lot of jet airplanes especially earlier ones had a
cone inlet um

and uh saying here that this and then that is efficient at high speed very high
speeds that's

really supersonic speeds uh but the claim here is that the falcon has
something a structure on

as nostrils which enables him to breed effectively at very high speeds

uh obviously there's all kinds of birds and here are some uh two or three
page

of different kinds of birds and uh here you can see this group of birds here
we talked about
albatross earlier um these birds are very good colliding birds and they can do
obviously this

soaring as we talked before a frigid bird is a similar kind of thing

um perhaps if you're if you have any interest in deep sea fishing you may
have read an anecdote

that uh frigid birds will uh glide along, soar along above marlin feeding in the
water because

the marlin leaves pieces of fishes it tells them and eats them and the frigate
can then just dive

down and pick up a free lunch um I once went deep sea fishing off of a tip of
the baja peninsula

kabosan lukas in baja peninsula in mexico uh and we were marlin fishing and
we're doing okay

and suddenly the first mate mexican fellow spotted a frigate bird which got
to captain all excited

um they put the boat into a sharp turn we sailed over in front of where the
big

frigate bird was flying through a bait in the water and bam marlin hit it so the
the

anecdote is clearly correct okay let's go now to slide 15 and here we have
some other very good

flyers but you see there's quite a difference here um these birds are efficient
flyers

swifts and swallows but they're also very maneuverable because they're
chasing insects okay

here is some gulls which are and other kinds of sea birds which go long
distances so they're very

very efficient flyers um they soar we saw the soaring over the side of the
ship i showed you

a sketch of that um in an earlier section uh but they're also very very

maneuverable so they have
a different configuration let's get slide 16 we talked earlier about things like
falters and these

birds clearly especially right at the bottom here are mostly soaring birds um
and here are falcons

and we've had a few things to say about falcons um earlier so you see
different features and different

general configurations is similar to airplanes and different airplanes for

different purposes

they have a rather different layout and configuration i only picked a couple
samples

there to show you that let's now move to slide 17 and this is really
interesting a fellow at the

Duke University did a whole lot of experiments with little budgie birds um
and he was able to

convince the bird to fly in a wind tunnel and had him hooked up to a little
oxygen mask so that he

could measure uh energy consumption power expended and things like that
by thinking you know

reckoning in its metabolism rate and all this sort of thing and he also was
able to convince

the bird to fly uphill and downhill uh by by tipping this whole device so a
really interesting

series of experiments which this fellow did and he come up with some really
useful uh kinds of

information let's go to the next slide and this is the flight performance of the
budgie

uh let's look at the horizontal flight curve first which is the solid curve

and this is the speed along the horizontal axis and power

on the vertical axis and you see that there's a minimum

and that makes some sense that it's inefficient to fly at a very low speed
okay because the flapping motion now has to produce most of the relative
wind to the wing

there isn't much forward speed so the bird has to work very hard using just
flapping motion

to produce an effective high enough velocity to produce enough lift and lift
and i'm saying

that in the sense of opposing the weight but also to produce thrust on the
other hand if we go

very fast and the power goes up because remember that the power is the
thrust times the velocity so

it makes some sense that there is a a minimum and for this particular bird it
occurs something

like eight meters a second and he's using like less than one watt of power uh
that's very little

a watt is a very little bit of power just think of even a 15 watt light bulb
there's a very dim

light bulb and so it's not very much power clearly it's harder for the bird to
climb

and so we have a different curve and it's easier for the bird to descend and
also these minimum

points shift slightly because he's now has to overcome you know potential
energy as well as

provide for forward to motion let's look at the slide number 19 this is the
drag versus the velocity

and then he also has the drag divided by weight this is the same thing the
minimum drag

here is about about eight grams and the lowest value of the drag to the
weight is about 0.22

and 11 meters a second and it's so that the optimum place to fly is not
actually the minimum

drag it's the minimum power consumption so this fellow really did a lot of
nice work and produced
a lot of useful and interesting kinds of information go to slide number 20

humans are just fascinated with trying to make a flying devices that behave
like birds

and there's a group at the University of Toronto which really has been
working very hard at this

and I recommend that you go and look on the website and they have some
nice little videos and you will

really have a lot of fun and you can see that they have this complicated
mechanism that produces

the flapping of the wings and they have had some very good success with
smaller vehicles not so

much success with full-size vehicles which can fly people around very well
but it's just an area

of very great fascination and interest it's pretty poor performance and even
appearance compared to

a bird but nonetheless it's a lot of fun and I do recommend the videos to you

okay what about formation flight how does that work formation flight is a
very interesting business

it does work I mean the geese obviously fly in formation other birds fly in
formation and so

this has been the subject of quite a little bit of study over time and what this
has to do with

what this has to do with mostly is minimizing the induced drag so what we
have on the lower left hand side

of slide number 21 you hear you see some measurements and I think that
probably the best

most useful part of this is this part B and C of this figure and you see what's
going

on here it has the little sketch of a little inset there of a flying bird with a total
wingspan B

and this spacing is S and then the number of birds and obviously if the birds
fly close to each other then this vertical patterns tip vortices this whole
pattern has changed if

they were really touching then we would have what amounts to one gigantic
wing depending upon

how many birds were actually easier to think of this I suppose if they're
gliding but touching

tip to tip then it would be one gigantic wing and in fact there has been
interest on and off with

this kind of thing for airplanes indeed we have in the last 10 years or so we
did quite a large

project here at Virginia Tech on that so-called hitchhiker airplane that if you
had a big airplane

you could connect say a smaller airplane on each wing tip and it turns out
that the power consumption

goes down compared to just a big airplane by itself and so you can carry
along let's say two airplanes

or maybe you put tip to tip put two on each wing tip of the big airplane etc
etc etc and you see

that the effects are not small here you can get a pretty sizable decrease in
the induced drag and

on the right hand side part C here you can see the reduction in power so
you're talking 20 30 percent

so it works and it's not so difficult to explain this is not the same as drafting
for example

bicycles or automobile racing that's a drag reduction because you get into
weight and change the pressure

distribution this is essentially creating close to what amounts to just a much

much

a wing with a much much greater effective span even though it's composed
of a number of birds or a number of airplanes

okay let's go to slide number 22 and talk about insect flight and there are
some differences with insect
flight and bird flight and that has largely to do with the lower Reynolds
number we're not going

to talk about real low Reynolds numbers in this section we'll return to that
when we because we

have a whole separate section on very low Reynolds numbers but obviously
insects have a smaller

Reynolds number than birds and some small birds have a much lower
Reynolds number than big birds

and we know that as the Reynolds number goes down the viscous effects
become stronger

it's harder to generate and to maintain vertical structures they dissipate very
rapidly

and what we've been looking at here is we're using the wings to generate

force to oppose the weight and we're also using the same wings to generate
a force for thrust

and this all depends upon the vortices and the generation of vortices
circulation

and this we're relying on the orientation of the airfoil section with respect to
an approach

velocity let's look now at slide number 22 this is just going to show you
hovering and i'm going

to return to hovering here a little bit later

let's talk about hovering and that and that is now we'll go back to propeller
because

the hovering bird as we saw on one of the the bottom of one of the earliest
slides where i said

we're going to come back to the to the hummingbird is essentially like a

helicopter producing a

rotor so we need to talk a little bit about rotors and the key thing in a
propeller or any

rotor is a quantity called the advanced ratio almost universally given the
symbol j and this is the
forward velocity divided by the diameter times the rotation rate of the of the
of the blades

so if we take a given propeller let's pick one the beta here has to do with the
picture of the

propeller the picture of propeller is imagined it almost like a screw thread as

it's screwing its

way through the air that's a very crude notion but it gives you the idea of
what of what it is

so let's for example just look at the curve which is labeled beta sub two here
and this is an efficiency

versus the advanced ratio and we will get a peak efficiency at some value of
the advanced

advanced ratio which would be a design condition and it would drop off very
rapidly past that and

what that has to do with is that for that given picture propeller then if we go
to a higher advanced

ratio or for example a higher velocity or we decrease the diameter or we

decrease the rotational rate then the local angles of the airfoil sections at
different

span-wise stations out along the rotor become misaligned with the resultant
wind velocity and

we get stall and obviously we get very very poor performance so depending
upon where we want to

operate then we have to have a different pitch propeller or you could have a
variable pitch

propeller that obviously has a complicated mechanical mechanism that

changes the twist at the base

but clearly variable pitch propellers do exist certainly on airplanes

they're expensive heavy and complicated but this is such a performance gain
that it's worthwhile

and but general aviation airplanes small airplanes generally just have a fixed
pitch propeller
most ships have fixed pitch propellers the only ships that routinely would
have variable pitch

propellers are tugboats and that's because you need to produce a lot of force
at low speed

which requires one kind of pitch setup advanced ratio operation and then
you want to be able to

cruise efficiently in your tugboat to get out to wherever it is you're going to

do your pushing

or tugging so that gives you some idea of this key parameter the advanced
ratio of

a rope people have attempted now to come up with a similar quantity for
flapping wings

so as you use the symbol j the velocity u is still the same but and the wing
bead frequency

now is replaces the rotational speed of the propeller and then we have a
stroke angle and the length

of the wing that come in here similar to the diameter so this is a and you get
similar kinds of effect

okay on slide number 26 i've attempted to crudely draw for you here how
rotors operate

and so i have on the vertical scale thrust and torque and on the horizontal
scale advanced ratio

and these are this is a qualitative sketch but it's it's certainly correct in that
sense

so what you will get is the thrust will start out at a high level and say
relatively flat for a

while and then fall rapidly and go through zero and of course as soon as the
thrust goes through

zero it becomes drag let's look at the torque the torque tends to go along
relatively flat

and then curves down i'm sorry my poor sketching with the power point tools
here it doesn't really
have a kink like that it would have a smooth corner and then you would be
putting torque in

okay power into the into the rotor and then finally the torque will go through
zero and so

then we can come up with some different regimes over to the left where both
the torque and the

thrust are positive we have a propeller in the middle region where the torque
is still positive

but the thrust is negative or that is drag we have an air brake so if i'm
operating an

at-regime i can slow myself down and if i go all the way to the right where
the torque is coming

out i can extract power from the device and that's a windmill and we'll talk
more about windmills

when we come to the wind engineering section okay let's move now to slide
27 and this attempts

to show most of these same things including here we've added in the auto
gyro and

pogel here has i think done a nice job with these sketches because he has
outlined of course what

it is we're really trying to do so if you look at the top left is a propeller blade
we're trying

to produce thrust and again this gets back to the relative orientation of the
effective wind

velocity which he has labeled here use of w we have the rotational

component the forward

component and we split them into lift and drag and then a resultant and then

decompose that into thrust and torque as we talked before the windmill
blade is doing similar things

except it's oriented differently because what we're trying to do now is to

extract torque and it
will be a drag no thrust to drag so that's a load on the windmill power and
again this has to do

with the wind speed now use of f is not really forward motion the wind
carbon is motionless but

the the wind is coming at it and then there's a rotational component and so
the effective

wind or approach velocity is use of w we produce a lift perpendicular to that

we get a resultant

force then we resolve that into components of torque and drag the helicopter
here has an induced

velocity which is induced by the motion of the rotor and it's like a essentially
downwash and

this is induced by the vertical pattern of the lifting blades and then we also
have a rotational

component so when we take into account the induced velocity and the
rotational component we get

the effective wind etc etc and then we're interested in lift as he put into little
box here and finally

the auto gyro is kind of interesting here we have a speed of descent and a
rotational speed

and again we produce a lift here's a maple seed rotor that worked pretty
nicely and so this is

an auto gyro slows down the rate of descent keeps the the maple seed up
longer and if there's a wind

it disperses a lot further this is a very nice picture from Japan of a smoke
filament approaching

a rotating maple seed and you can see a very very nice vertical pattern
obviously there's a tip

vortex coming off the maple seed and you can see that right at the bottom I
think you can see the

sort of the seed part and then the wing part if you want the maple seed
going off to the
to the right so a lot of interest in this just because they're kind of fun

and there are many more kinds of maple seeds certainly than I was ever
aware of and some have

two blades some have a single blade some have several blades and you can
see some sketches here

and we can get into tip speeds and the disc loading this is like the wing
loading kind of business

that we talked about when we're talking about gliding and things of that
nature and here is

the rate of descent and disc loading and he has some different experimental
measurements and

in the azuma book he has some theoretical expressions also to accompany

that

okay one way to look at all of these devices all of these rotors is something
called

it's a simple model an analytical model called an actuator disc where we just
let's look at the

by any of these sketches here stream tube let's look at figure 12 six from
focal if you will for a

moment so we imagine the rotor replaced by just some sort of pressure jump
or force field

distributed over a disc and it may even be assumed to be a uniform with

radius over the whole disc

area or not depending upon the complexity of the analysis now let me draw
your attention to the

sketch on the top left of slide number 31 so now this is a side view and this is
for a propeller

you see the stream tube which goes through the tips of the propeller disc the
propeller rotor

and obviously the propeller speeds up fluid that's how it produces thrust

change in momentum but there's also a pressure jump at the rotor and this
is sketched here
just below the bottom part of the figure on the top left of slide number 31

and so there's a pressure change pretty abrupt right at the disc and then
that relaxes and so

the result of this from the actuator disc analysis is that the final change in
velocity

half of that takes place at the right in the rotor itself and then the rest of the
increase

for a propeller the increase takes place as the pressure relaxes for the
situation in the windmill

we have we're taking power out so actually the fluid slows down going
through the rotor

and you see the pressure change is different but again half of the final
velocity change

takes place right at the rotor itself and you can do a lot of useful things with
this kind of

a pretty simple analysis i'm just giving you the highlights here

okay hummingbirds are obviously really fascinating to to watch and to

observe and i've just found

a couple of pictures and some flow visualization of the flow pattern in the
vicinity of the humming

bird also on slide number 32 but let's look at the picture of the rotor here

a little better and so on the sort of the middle i guess of this figure we have
like a helicopter

rotor and here it's showing the same kind of little velocity variation and
pressure variation

that i showed earlier and here he this author actually is labeling the you
noticed that the

velocity change is about half well theoretically it's exactly half of the ultimate
velocity change

and then on the right hand side of the figure we have the hummingbird and
the hummingbird is flapping
and twisting and moving its wings four and a half at a very rapid rate in order
to keep the little

the airfoil sections oriented correctly with respect to the not only the induced
velocity

and the components of the motion of the wing and so and the hummingbird
sweeps almost the full area

of the disc defined by the tips of its blades not quite but you see here rather
a pretty good

percentage of the total disc area you can calculate the induced velocity

by summing up now getting the weight in the area of the disc and what have
you and then the power

is the thrust times that and the thrust is obviously got to be equal to the
weight in this case

goes to thrust us in the vertical direction and so we get the result which is
shown towards the

bottom of the slide and the message is pretty clear it's good to keep weight
down obviously

all flying machines it's good to keep the weight down because we don't have
to generate so much lift

but that's really true of something like a hovering flight and long thin wings
are best

you can see that from the area of the disc here and so and clearly the same
thing is true for

helicopters go now to slide 34 and this gives you a rough sketch of the the
vertical pattern

ideally the hovering bird hummingbird produces a stack of ring vortices as

it's going through

this complicated motion of the wings okay i mentioned earlier about insects
and that there is a

as the insects are small therefore they have relatively low Reynolds numbers
not low low
we're going to come back to that but relatively low Reynolds numbers it's
hard to produce and

maintain vortices under those circumstances so the index has to do

something a little

trickier and this is the so-called clap and fling mechanism and what the
insect is going to do now

is to generate vortices off of the leading edge of the wing okay by a motion
of bring the

the leading edges of the wing together and then suddenly diverge them so
it's going to clap

the leading edge together and then open it up so it's clap and fling and the
so on the left hand

side of this figure you see they have just clapped together and then they are
starting to open up

rapidly right and they're not just spreading apart they're the wings twist so
that it opens up

most rapidly along what i'm calling the leading edges and here they're top
edges if you want

and then that motion generates verticals structure right off the rapidly
moving

and sort of in this sketch here sort of side-wise moving

flat plates if you want so it's like a flat plate in a steady situation a flat plate
held

perpendicular to a flow we get a lot of separation off the top and bottom
edges flow separates and

we get big vortices coming off so the insect is doing something like that
because it's harder

for the insect to generate and maintain vortices by the normal way or what
we i'm calling the normal

way of of a bird wing or an airplane wing now it's slide 36 i think this is
sketched pretty nicely
here this is a wasp and it's showing the time and milliseconds obviously the
wasp beats its wings

very rapidly that's why we hear that high pitched sound so here is his he
actually is throwing in

here something called flip people have a basically this is clapping fling he
puts a flip in the middle

and you can see how they come together spread apart come together and
and just do this very very

rapidly here and he's talking about 374 Hertz here

that picture this is a hornet and you see this is a time exposure and the tips
of the wing have

been gilded and the hornet goes through a similar kind of emotion

here is butterflies and and what i like about this series of sketches on the left
hand side

on slide number 38 is the since the butterfly has a rather big cord to its wing
you can see

these motions very very nicely and so he is showing you here a front view
and you can see that they're

they're sort of peeling apart they're not just opening up and he is then in the
middle he shows

the line of contact at different places in this through this cycle okay so at the
top

they're essentially touching all the way and then they start to open up you
see in in

row two there's a line of contact near the leading edge and then that line of
contact moves down as

as the butterfly throws its wings open but in a in a in a twisting motion and
he's talking here

about the Reynolds number on the right hand side something like 4000
which is certainly low compared

to an albatross or an airplane but is not what we would call in the real low
Reynolds number regime
so we might not think of butterflies as if as especially efficient flyers although
they are

when you think of how far they for example the monarch butterflies migrate
but this because of the

configuration of their wings it makes it easier to to see this clap and fling
motion that we've

been talking about okay now i've just collected here some pictures again
typical configurations

and flight modes of insects some insects obviously have two sets of wings
which they can use by

changing the phase and interesting combinations that you see here okay so
that's discussed a little

bit on this slide and that's kind of thing that has produced a lot of interest in

dragonflies and again the people in Japan scientists and engineers in Japan
seem to be

particularly interested in all of these topics and i showed you some wind
tunnel experiments

and things like that on slide 40 we have some beetles and it also talks about
how many wings

they might have we don't think of beetles as flying very well certainly
ladybugs and things of that

nature and some of these beetles seem to separate the functions of a

generating force to overcome

their weight and thrust into forward wings and pears of hind wings so you
see there's a lot of

variety in the way creatures fly but hopefully now you have a little bit of
understanding how that

operates in a general way at least and then we're going to talk in a later
section of section

following this one about swimming and we'll see that there's a lot in common
here