Symmetry breaking leads to forward flapping flight

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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