Tailoring Flapping Wings to Facilitate Desired Deformed Shapes

A method for tailoring the deformed shape of a flapping wing was studied. It is shown that a typical, desired steady-state response can be approximated well with just the first few modes. It is assumed that the input base excitation was a combination of heaving and pitching. The results show that the desired steady-state vibration of the wing can be approximated to a reasonable level of accuracy by optimizing the ply orientation and the frequency of base excitation. The aerodynamic loads, if available from computational fluid dynamics calculations, should be applied on the structure while computing steady-state responses that are used to determine the required base excitation. Using the input parameters as the design variables the minimum normalized rms error was computed to be 0.3%, which is very close to the optimal normalized rms error of 0.2114% that is obtained using the optimal mode participation factors.