3-D CFD analysis of bio-inspired corrugated wings for MAVs

The dragonfly is one of the most agile natural flyers. The dragonfly wings are not like aircraft wings but have corrugations on the wing on upper and lower surfaces. This paper investigated the flow behavior of the corrugated wing and compared it with the conventional wing with smooth surfaces. For this, two CAD models of the corrugated wings were taken from the mid-section of the real dragonfly forewing and simulated by the Computational Fluid Dynamics tool. The Reynolds number was at 80,000, and the angles of attack were from 00 to 80. The flow behavior was analyzed using 3-Dimentional CFD to form the leading-edge vortices, spanwise flow, tip vortices, pressure, and velocity contours. The result showed that both corrugated wings produced LEVs, and spanwise flow wasn't noticed on the conventional smooth wing. The results were validated by experiments and were very close to the computational results. Results also showed that the modified simple corrugated wing was the most efficient among all tested wings at high angles of attack. These corrugated wings may be beneficial for future wing design of micro air vehicles.