![]() The other authors were Zafar Anwar, a doctoral student in the Penn State Department of Mechanical Engineering Bret W. "Even though the technology is not there yet to fully mimic hummingbird flight, our work provides essential principles for informed mimicry of hummingbirds hopefully for the next generation of agile aerial systems," he said. While Cheng emphasized that the results from the optimized model are predictions that will need validation, he said that it has implications for technological development of aerial vehicles. In this way, the wings have very good agility in the up and down motion as well as the twist motion." They tighten their wings in the pitch and up-down directions but keep the wing loose along the back-and-forth direction, so their wings appear to be flapping back and forth only while their power muscles, or their flight engines, are actually pulling the wings in all three directions. "We found that hummingbirds are using similar kind of a mechanism. "It's like when we do fitness training and a trainer says to tighten your core to be more agile," Cheng said. The researchers also found that hummingbirds tighten their shoulder joints in both the up-and-down direction and the pitch direction using multiple smaller muscles. The first discovery, according to Cheng, was that hummingbirds' primary muscles, that is, their flight engines, do not simply flap their wings in a simple back and forth motion, but instead pull their wings in three directions: up and down, back and forth, and twisting - or pitching - of the wing. With this model, the researchers uncovered previously unknown principles of hummingbird wing actuation. ![]() And that torque is something we use to calibrate our model." "From that, we are able to back-calculate the required total muscular torque that is needed to flap the wing. "We can simulate the whole reconstructed motion of the hummingbird wing and then simulate all the flows and forces generated by the flapping wing, including all the pressure acting on the wing," Cheng said. According to the researchers, their approach is the first to integrate these disparate parts for biological fliers. They also used an optimization algorithm based on evolutionary strategies, known as the genetic algorithm, to calibrate the parameters of the model. The researchers used muscle anatomy literature, computational fluid dynamics simulation data and wing-skeletal movement information captured using micro-CT and X-ray methods to inform their model. The data that we can get from those measurements are limited." ![]() But most insects and, among birds specifically, hummingbirds are very small. "The traditional methods have mostly focused on measuring activity of a bird or insect when they are in natural flight or in an artificial environment where flight-like conditions are simulated. "We essentially reverse-engineered the inner working of the wing musculoskeletal system - how the muscles and skeleton work in hummingbirds to flap the wings," said first author and Penn State mechanical engineering graduate student Suyash Agrawal. George Covell and Richard Waggener died in the crash.Their results were published this week in the Proceedings of Royal Society B. The blazing wreckage tumbled 75 feet to the beach below. On the 10th of August 1927 the pair took off from North Island Naval Air Station for the airfield at Bay Farm Island, Oakland, the starting point of the race to Hawaii.įifteen minutes after take-off and struggling to gain height, the plane slammed into a cliff on the fog-enshrouded Point Loma, a promontory that rises some 400 feet above San Diego Bay. Two US Navy officers, George Covell and Richard Waggener, had entered a Tremaine Humming Bird, a plane based on the German Junkers design, in the Dole Derby. Information is only available from news, social media or unofficial sources ![]()
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