Friday March 23, 2018 3:15 p.m. Yost, 306

Speaker: Nick Moore, Florida State University Department of Mathematics

Title: How Focused Flexibility Maximizes the Thrust Production of Flapping Wings

Abstract: Birds, insects, and fish all exploit the fact that flexible wings or fins generally perform better. It is not clear, though, how to best distribute flexibility: Should a wing be uniformly flexible, or should certain sections be more rigid than others? I will discuss this question by using a 2D small-amplitude model combined with an efficient Chebyshev PDE solver. Numerical optimization shows that concentrating flexibility near the leading edge of the wing maximizes thrust production.

Host: Longhua Zhao, Assistant Professor