Nicolas Vandenberghe
Applied Math Lab, CIMS.
| Flapping flight is ubiquitous in Nature, yet cilia and flagella, not wings, prevail in the world of micro-organisms. We discuss this dichotomy. In our experiment, a wing, mounted on a shaft and free to move horizontally, is flapped up and down. The wing begins to move forward spontaneously as a critical frequency is exceeded, indicating that "forward flapping flight" occurs as a symmetry-breaking bifurcation from the state of rest. A dimensionless parameter is identified which determines the point of bifurcation, thus providing a physical basis for the very different methods of locomotion of large and small organisms. |
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