| This study will address the propulsion and flight mechanism of natural biological systems and man-made devices like Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs). Recently, interest in MAVs have grown considerably because of their wide ranging applications in observation, surveillance, military intelligence as well as exploration in chemical and nuclear high risk areas. A better design of these devices depends on: identifying the most optimal system parametric space, and, understanding the underlying complex unsteady fluid-dynamics. The flow field involves complex interaction of vortex regions and requires intricate grids to resolve it. The project will focus on developing an efficient and accurate grid-less Lagrangian numerical tool suitable to resolve the vortex dominated flow-field. The Lagrangian tool brings in significant reduction in computational storage and time without sacrificing the accuracy of the solution. The applicant has the background of developing a Lagrangian technique and has applied it to analyze unsteady flow-field around oscillating airfoils. The method uses random techniques to model the diffusion, which fails at low Reynolds numbers. The main subject of the one year project will be to extend the existing code at low Reynolds number(below 1000), covering a larger variety of biological species and MAVs of different sizes. The proposed tool will be validated against the experimental results available with the host group. The tool will add to better understanding of the unsteady flow field, examine the parametric space for optimal range and also help benchmark the grid-based code currently being developed at the host group. |
