Abstract

Micro aerial vehicles design, due to their low Reynolds number aerodynamics, motivated the aerospace engineering community a lot the last year, and especially the flapping wing operated MAVs.

The simulation of the mechanical equations of motion for a flapping wing MAV is presented in this work to have an approximate the behavior and the condition of flight of the vehicle and to present a control model that can be implemented to auto control the vehicle.

The spherical coordinates system is used to develop the equations in this work , and Mathcad software is mainly used for the solution, simulation and graphing of the results, constants related to the size of the vehicle are changed to match different a range of existing flying insects or birds.

Upstroke and down stroke of the flapping wing were modeled using two different drag coefficient.

The study resulted in excluding the smaller sizes and higher flapping frequency from use of this model without any rectifications that account for the accentuated mow Reynolds unsteady effect, but bigger vehicles (bird sized) were modeled with a good accuracy and the model can be used as well for auto-control by predefined flying path.