Insect Flight - insight

This article gives good information about the insect flight:

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insect_flight

Understand that basically there are 2 types of insect flights:
a) Direct
b) Indirect

Dragon flies are from very long time ago.. probably longer than dinosaurs.

Reynolds number (Re) - need to look further into this.
Re ranges from 10 (low turbulance - small insects) to 10000 (high turbulance - large insects)

Insects range from .02g to 3g (grams)
mass is directly poportional to wing area
mass is inversly proportinal to beat frequency

needs more reading....

calculation method for amount of thrust required

calculation method for amount of thrust required during flight

example used is Archaeopteryx

http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/news/file013.html

Birds are the perfect flying machines - key points

sites to read:

more understanding of bird flight

http://wings.avkids.com/Book/Animals/intermediate/birds-01.html

1) Talks about feathers how they are made up. Understood that there is lot of air in between the feathers

2) ears of the birds are critical for their balance during flight?

3) birds generate energy faster than human beings - humming birds burn 50 times more than human

4) The lift generated is proportional to square of the speed of the bird.

As bird triples it speed lift generated increases 9 times!

5) Bird thrusts forward by flapping their wings

6) Move your arms fast & then twist them

7) Birds can glide -

use energy from thermal currents - light weight air rises & birds use these currents to fly with minimum energy. That is why some birds wait till late morning to start flying. So, that the sun heats the earth and the hot air rises.

Some birds use the wind risen from obstruction like mountains or high rise buildings

8) Birds are perfect flying machines - humans are not.

lets look at some more living beings who fly but are not areodynamically perfect like birds..

http://wings.avkids.com/Book/Nature/advanced/index.html

Leg Thrust Important

This paper talks about importance in leg thrust during a birds take off.

http://jeb.biologists.org/cgi/reprint/114/1/285.pdf

A very nice paper, provided good information like bird generates force nearly 1.6 times of its body weight.

Also, it introduced me to concept of clap-and- fling.

Other things like bird of a pigeon is around 300 gms was one I was looking for.

Fight of a Bird

A very neat explanation of how birds fly and different types of wings

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird_flight

So from this article I understood what is required to fly.

Also, it is seen that different types of birds have different wing shapes, heavy birds (like eagle) might have short wing size for easy take off.

One conclusion that I can draw from this article is that no matter the weight, one can fly given type of wing and more important amount of energy expended during flight.

Aeroplane Working

Neat explanation of how fight works...

http://www.allstar.fiu.edu/aerojava/airflylvl3.htm

This site gives a good explanation one principles of flight.

Human Powered Flights

Following site provides details of human powered flights:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man-powered_flight

Details include, who made the longest sustained flights etc.

I was amazed to know that the longest flight was 115kM...ooff,,,, too long. (Daedalus 88)

However, what amazed me further was that this record was set in 1988!!

It has been more than twenty one years since that record has been broken! (today 27th Dec 2009)

source:

http://records.fai.org/manpowered/history.asp?id1=178&id2=1&id3=12